


in a string of days, a year is gone

by WritingToKeepMySanity



Category: Darkwing Duck (Cartoon 1991), DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, M/M, Mostly Fluff, Sick Fic, Trans Male Character, minor relationship - Freeform, much watching of darkwing duck telenovelas and inspector spacetime oh my, pinch of angst, time jumps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29339619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingToKeepMySanity/pseuds/WritingToKeepMySanity
Summary: It's two weeks after the Fearsome Four before Drake asks Gosalyn where she's been living since her grandpa disappeared. And it's a year later that Gosalyn calls them a family.post-“Let’s Get Dangerous!”
Relationships: Drake Mallard & Gosalyn Mallard, Drake Mallard & Gosalyn Mallard & Launchpad McQuack, Drake Mallard/Launchpad McQuack
Comments: 19
Kudos: 77
Collections: fav fics ever : hall of fame





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drake knows next to nothing about raising a kid. Sure, he can teach her crime-fighting and how to get dangerous, but sick days and calls from school and mood swings? He doesn't have any clue what he's doing, but damn if he won't do right by her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this started out out as a “fun little side project” that I didn’t even think I’d actually publish, but really wanted to write because I just love Drake and Gos so much. A month later, it ended up 60+ pages and so far from the original idea and it actually ended up being a lot of fun to write so?? Ta-da??
> 
> title from “How You’ve Grown” by 10,000 Maniacs

It’s two weeks after the Fearsome Four before Drake thinks to ask Gosalyn where she’d been living since her Grandpa’s disappearance.

(In his defense, they’ve been out on patrol almost every night, and he’s still trying to come in to his own as St. Canard’s hero as well as be a sort-of-guardian-slash-crime-fighting-partner-slash-mentor to Gosalyn, so he hasn’t had a chance to think about it, and she'd never offered the information herself.)

But one day, once they’ve slept after patrol, Gosalyn realizes she’s run out of clean clothes and one of her favorite shirts is missing, and, suddenly, she’s up on the windowsill refusing to talk to Drake.

He’s not sure what to do at first, and lets her stay up there for almost twenty minutes before he approaches her cautiously.

Her knees are curled up to her chest and her hood pulled up to hide her face when he approaches. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, but Gosalyn flinches away from him.

Drake drops his hand, curling it into a fist by his hip. He’s not good at this part of having Gosalyn here. The crime-fighting, the getting dangerous, that he could do and teach her, but these moments where she gets in these moods and refuses to speak to him? He’s as lost as he was the first night he put on the cape, thinking he could actually be a hero.

“We’ve, uhm. Been going pretty fast the last couple weeks. We can do laundry before patrol tonight, maybe your shirt will show up—”

“It won’t,” Gosalyn says shortly. “I left it.”

“You…left it?” And that’s when it hits him. He doesn’t know how long Professor Waddlemeyer had even been missing before he found her sneaking into McDuck Labs or where she’d been living. “Gosalyn, what…happened after your grandpa? To you?”

She doesn’t look at him, her chin pressed into arms, staring out across the bay. “I was sent to a foster home. Well,” she amends with a shrug. “A few foster homes. Conspiracy theories about your missing grandpa don’t exactly go over well with new parents.”

“For how long?”

“A month? Maybe longer.”

A _few_ foster homes in over a month? Drake’s heart breaks all over again, just like it did watching Gosalyn choose to destroy the Ramrod to save them. “Do you mind telling me where you were last?”

She’s quiet for a long while, and Drake doesn’t think she’ll answer him. He can’t blame her; the kid had lost her grandfather, been bounced around the system, and decided to shack up with a wannabe superhero. It didn’t exactly speak to stability.

“Mrs. Cavanaugh’s,” she finally says, tugging back her hood. “Here in St. Canard.”

“And when I caught you sneaking into McDuck’s lab?” he asks gently.

“I snuck out, trying to prove what Bulba did. Didn’t think I was gonna end up fighting crime with a superhero,” she says it casually, but the way she folds her hands in the sleeves of her hoodie, like she’s trying to hide from him, tell a different story. “So I left some things back at the house.”

Too many questions start swirling around in his head—if she’d been in a foster home, how did no one notice when she snuck out? She’d been gone for two weeks, was no one, this Mrs. Cavanaugh, looking for her? Is he supposed to send her back? That’s the responsible thing to do, right?

“So, your stuff…”

“Forget about it, Darkwing,” Gosalyn says, sniffing harshly.

He tries not to wince at her calling him Darkwing. She hasn’t called him Drake the whole time she’s stayed with him, which he partly understands, but. It feels different than when Launchpad calls him DW, like a nickname just for them. It feels like she’s purposefully avoiding his real name.

“But if it’s there—” Drake tries again, only to be cut off, again.

“It’s not, okay?” She stands, climbing down from the windowsill, jamming her fists in her pockets and pacing. “Anything I left there’s probably been stolen or given away or…It’s not there, alright?”

He shouldn’t push her, but something about her agitation just makes him want to help her all the more, and his mouth runs off before he can think. “Well, we can try something, right? I can…go talk to Mrs. Cavanaugh, see if she has anything still—”

“I don’t need your help, okay? I don’t need anyone’s help.” With that, she turns on her heel and stalks to the archer range across the tower, picking up her crossbow on the way, message clear.

_Conversation over._

He remains seated on the windowsill, leaning his elbows on his knees as the steady _thunk, thunk, thunk_ , of Gosalyn’s arrows hitting the target echo in the room.

She’s right. Gosalyn doesn’t need anyone. Even before he came along, crashing her plans, she’d been well on her way to proving Bulba’s involvement in her grandfather’s disappearance. She’s a tough, spirited, kid who knew her way around a crossbow like nobody’s business. She didn’t need his, or anyone’s, help.

That’s why, two days later, after some online sleuthing, a little help from W.A.N.D.A., a minor case of breaking and entering, and narrowly avoiding an incredibly light-sleeping hen, when a duffel bag full of Gosalyn’s belongings from the foster home appear on her bed, they don’t speak about it.

They do, however, talk about the other elephant in the tower.

“Uh, Gosalyn,” he says, trying not to watch her unpack the bag. He knows what’s in it—a handful of shirts, including a purple jersey with a large number one logo stitched on it, some books, a small toolkit, and a couple of little figurines of what he thinks are wrestlers—but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a dozen questions about the items and her life before.

She doesn’t look at him, too busy fidgeting with one of her figurines.

Drake continues. “I know you’re still looking for your family, but I, uh, if you want, I talked to Launchpad, and Mr. McDuck can help me with the papers to be…well, your, kind of, guardian. Until we find your grandpa, of course. It’s just so you can stay here. Unless you want to go back to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s,” he adds quickly, even if the words taste bitter.

If it’s what she wants, he’ll take her back tonight, go on patrols with just LP, figure out the Ramrod with Fenton, and learn to unlearn what life was like with Gosalyn in the tower.

She pauses, her fingers on the spine of an advanced physics textbook, head bent to avoid his gaze. “I can stay with you?” she asks, voice soft.

“Well, yeah!” he says, without a second’s thought. Sure, it’d only been two weeks, but he already can’t imagine life without Gosalyn, just as much as he can’t imagine not having LP as his partner or being Darkwing himself. Even if she’s messy and stubborn and argues with him more than he really likes, he’s grown fond of how she’s inexplicably underfoot and asks for his help with trick shots on her bow, and even though he knows their situation is temporary, he doesn’t want to bring an end to it.

“Besides, what kind of crime-fighting partner would I be if I didn’t let you stay?” he adds. “I like you staying here, and you basically live here already. This just makes it official—”

He’s cut off by two arms wrapping around his waist, tiny hands bunching in his shirt. Gosalyn’s cheek presses into his stomach and Drake’s arms belatedly circle her shoulders.

“I wanna stay here,” she admits softly. Before he can say anything back, she pulls away, brushing at her face hastily. “And you’d be a pretty bad crime-fighting partner if you kicked me out, so I’d have to tell people where your super-secret lair was.”

He laughs, letting her go. “Well, can’t risk that, can I?”

~*~

“So…that’s _Darkwing Duck_ ,” Gosalyn says slowly as the closing theme song played on the screen.

It’s a slow crime night, so they’re in the tower, killing time until W.A.N.D.A. alerts them to anything. They were suited up to go at a moment’s notice, but after three hours of no crimes reported, their night was shaping up to be a quiet one. 

Launchpad had found Drake’s _Darkwing Duck_ DVD collection an hour in, and they’d been watching—for inspiration, of course—ever since. Gosalyn had wandered over from her target practice two episodes in, plopping down in the chair next to the couch. She’d watched bemusedly, brow furrowed, like she wasn’t sure what to make of the show. 

“Sure is!” Launchpad says. “What do you think?”

She shrugs, kicking her legs against the arm of the chair. “Well, I’m definitely not letting you guys out-vote me on movie night again.”

"That is my emotional support T.V. show you're talking about," Drake jokes, taking off his hat and tossing it at her chair.

She raises her hands in defense. “I’m just saying, _Inspector Spacetime_ has better effects, and it’s older than my grandpa.”

“Hey! I…don’t know what that is,” Drake admits.

“Well, does your Inspector Spaceman always get up and fight for what’s right?” Launchpad asks.

“Does Darkwing Duck fight aliens? Or robots? Or alien robots?” Gosalyn counters, bending over to pick up Drake's hat.

Launchpad opens his mouth, holding up a finger for a moment before pointing it at the purple hat. “He fought hat aliens once.”

“ _Lame_ ,” Gosalyn says with feeling, plopping the hat on her head. "What do hat aliens even do?" 

"Well—" Drake starts, only to be immediately cut off.

"I don't wanna know," she says, tilting her head back so she can look at them from under the wide brim of the hat. 

“But he fought Megavolt!” Launchpad insists. “And Bushroot, and the Liquidator, and—”

“—Quackerjack,” Drake adds with a light laugh. “You know, LP, we fought them, too, like, a month ago.”

Eyes widening slightly, Launchpad nods, grinning. “Yeah. That was awesome.”

“Exactly. We fought Darkwing’s villains, I wanna fight alien robots now,” Gosalyn says, sounding excited by the idea.

Drake snorts. "Alright, Gosalyn. If we ever find alien robots in St. Canard, you're in charge. Until then, I'm good sticking with our criminals." 

She "hmph"s, taking off his hat. "Fine. But you said it. I'm in charge."

"I thought you liked those..." Launchpad shudders. "Creepy horror movies."

Gosalyn shrugs. "I do, but _Inspector Spacetime_ is Grandpa's favorite show, so we watched it a bunch. Whenever I stayed home sick from school, we'd watch it all day."

Drake stands, stretching a little and picking up the empty popcorn bowl and carrying it to the little kitchenette as LP starts another episode.

Normally, a slow night like this would drive him up the wall. He didn't become a superhero to sit around and look good in a cape, after all (even though he did). 

But tonight...he finds he doesn't mind hanging out with Launchpad and Gosalyn, even if she was making fun of _Darkwing Duck_. 

"Seriously, that's your guys' favorite T.V. show?" he hears her ask Launchpad as he crosses the tower.

"Well, think about your Spaceman show—"

"He's not a spaceman, he's a regular man who travels through time and space, but go on."

"—You watch it when you feel sad or bored or sick or, heck, happy, even. It's comforting. It's the same for us with _Darkwing Duck_."

"Huh. I guess get that."

The sound of popcorn popping drowns out whatever conversation LP and Gosalyn are having. Drake idly tidies up, wiping down the counters, when their voices filter through the room again. 

"—and he's always wanted to be like Darkwing Duck."

“Wait seriously? _That_ Darkwing?" Gosalyn asks in disbelief. “I mean, I guess he’s cool, but our Darkwing's way cooler.”

Drake pauses when he hears that. For all her grief about _Darkwing Duck_ , he didn't expect her to call the show "cool"—the highest praise a nine-year-old can give, he's learned—but to then claim he's cooler than his hero?

It's definitely one of the nicest things anyone's said about him.

"You know, sometimes," she adds. 

" _I'm sorry to_ _interrupt_ ," W.A.N.D.A. says before he can even fake indignance. " _But_ _there appears to be a disturbance on the East side that requires superhero assistance._ "

"Is it aliens?" Gosalyn asks excitedly.

If a computer could give an incredulous pause, WA.N.D.A. does then. " _No, the disturbance is decidedly terrestrial._ "

"Boo."

~*~

Gosalyn’s head is heavy on his side and Drake looks down to see her fast asleep. It's good, though, right, that she's sleeping again? He read sleeping off the flu was the best you could do besides fluids and medicine. 

He'd been half-out of his mind when she woke up sick. His go-to when he's sick (or injured, for that matter) is flat-out denial, so he's a little rusty at taking care of...anyone, really. 

(Something he's desperately trying to overcome, now, with a nine-year-old living under his roof and a boyfriend.)

But she's feeling much cooler than this morning, which is definitely good, and she seemed to perk up after some food and medicine, and even managed to tease him about his lack of alien knowledge, and the worry had sapped from him. 

Her braid's already coming undone and he makes a slight face at it. Her hair's a lot thicker than his had been, once upon a time. He'll have to learn how to take care of curly hair, at least while she lived here.

His phone buzzes, and he quietly reaches for the remote, turning the T.V. off, and gently shifts Gosalyn onto her pillow before standing and walking out of her room, answering Launchpad's call. 

"Hey, Launchpad."

"Hey DW!" LP shouts into the phone, the roar of traffic clear on the line. He says something else, but it's lost in the noise around him. 

"Sorry, LP," Drake says, sitting down in the chair in front of W.A.N.D.A. "I can't hear you. I think it's all the traffic."

"Just a sec, DW! I can't hear you over the traffic!" Launchpad yells into the phone. There's a squealing of brakes and a crunch of metal on metal.

There's a deafening silence before he asks, "Launchpad? You okay?" 

"Yeah, I'm okay! Just crashed into Mr. McDee's gates, hold on!" 

It's a testament to how accustomed to his boyfriend's driving he's become when he relaxes at him _just_ crashing into the ornate gates that surround McDuck Manor. Better to crash into something that can't crash back, or demand to see insurance.

Launchpad returns, voice still booming, but not as loud. "Okay, Mrs. B's coming out to help me. Gate sorta caved in, I got locked out." Drake hears the creaking of metal and can imagine LP stretching out on the hood of the limo, one arm behind his head.

"How's Gosalyn? Ya want me to bring over anything?"

It never ceases to amaze Drake just how much Launchpad cares for Gosalyn, too, even though he technically only ever signed up to be _Darkwing's_ partner, not Drake's, and everything extra that came with the latter.

He still remembers the night he asked LP to be Darkwing's crime-fighting partner—officially, since Launchpad had already offered to be in St. Canard every night, loathe to leave their new family. Launchpad's eyes had lit up and his smile had been so wide, it'd made Drake's heart squeeze harder than LP's bone-crushing hug. 

"No, you get some sleep, enjoy the night off, LP. And she's better, yeah. I think she just needs to sleep it off, now." And, because he still can't really believe it, Drake adds, "Uh, she called me Drake today."

"Well, that's your name, right?" 

He laughs. "I mean it's the first time she's called me Drake, LP." 

"That's a pretty big deal, then, yeah?" Launchpad asks, his voice soft. "It's been almost two months."

It shouldn't be, but it feels huge and terrifying, because Drake knows that for Gosalyn to even allow herself to be sick and vulnerable at all is a big step in her trusting him, but to drop "Darkwing" completely isn't something he'd expected from her. 

When he goes out as Darkwing, as thankless and underappreciated and unseen as he can feel sometimes, he feels the weight of every St. Canard citizen, trusting him to protect them from villains, bad guys, and just plain bored teenagers with too much time on their hands. 

And even all that can't compare to the knowledge that this young girl, now asleep in the other room, has allowed whatever walls she had up to come down and put herself in his hands.

"Yeah," he says, smiling a little. "Yeah." 

~*~

Gizmoduck is sprawled on the ground, visor cracked and chest logo dimmed.

Darkwing and Gosalyn dive into the alleyway, narrowly avoiding the bolt of lightning shot at them. Ducking her head around the corner, Gos shoots a netted arrow at the villain, tangling him up in it, causing him to fall, before running back out to Gizmoduck.

Darkwing gathers a handful of Dr. Atmoz Fear—ugh, weather-themed villain and their puns—jacket, lifting him up and punching him in the face before dragging him to a nearby parking meter. Handcuffing him to it, he turned back to Gosalyn.

“Darkwing, he’s not waking up.” She sounds scared, and he wants nothing more than to erase that fear, no matter how he feels about the other superhero.

He hadn’t even wanted to call Gizmoduck out, but Dr. Atmoz Fear had turned out to be the worst villain they’d faced since the Fearsome Four and Bulba, and it was just the two of them that night. LP’s off flying Mr. McDuck to Birdbados, and, seriously, this guy could control _lightning_ , how was _that_ fair?

So Darkwing had called Fenton on the watch-communicator the scientist had given him when he’d first started patrolling, and Fenton had called Gizmoduck, and the Tin Duck had showed up in a flash of jet packs and splatter of key lime pie.

Credit where credit’s due, though, Darkwing could admit Gizmodork wasn’t a half-bad fighter, and they’d managed to lead Dr. Atmoz Fear away from downtown and towards the bay. It’d almost looked like they’d wear him down.

And then Dr. Atmoz Fear had summoned the last of his energy and shot the biggest bolt of lightning directly at Gizmoduck, shooting him out of the sky. He’d landed on the ground with a hollow _thud_ as Dr. Atmoz Fear stumbled, giving Darkwing and the Crimson Quackette time to find cover.

A siren wails in the distance, and Darkwing knows they need to get out of there before the police arrive and start asking questions in the way they do (and has absolutely nothing to do with not wanting to be seen working with Gizmoduck, no sir).

“Okay, we’ll take him back to the tower,” he says. “We can check him out there.”

Hoisting Gizmoduck over one shoulder, Darkwing staggers under the weight of the suit. “Geez, Giz, how do you get around in this thing?” he mutters.

“Duh, he flies, Darkwing,” Gosalyn says, moving behind Gizmoduck to help steer.

With her help, he wheels Gizmoduck to the Ratcatcher, dropping him unceremoniously in the sidecar. After some arranging, they manage to get the larger duck into the car as the sirens grow louder.

Handing Gosalyn her helmet, he helps her onto the bike behind him and they roar off into the night, back to the Audubon Bay Bridge.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” she asks, worried voice in his ear.

Darkwing glances down at Gizmoduck, head lolling at an awkward angle. “Yeah, of course,” he says, trying for upbeat. “We’ll get him back to the tower and get him out of the suit. He’ll be fine.”

“You mean we’ll have to take his helmet off? See who Gizmoduck is? Isn’t that against some superhero code?” 

He feels his beak curl, knowing that if it was him in the sidecar, the last thing he’d want was his mask removed, even if he’d been hurt. But he had Launchpad and Gosalyn who knew that—who did Gizmoduck have? Darkwing had only ever seen the Tin Duck fight solo.

“We won’t take off his helmet if we can help it,” he says decisively. “Just make sure the lightning didn’t burn him, or anything.”

“Hey, you don’t think Fenton’s Gizmoduck, do you?” Gosalyn asks, after a moment of weaving in and out of traffic.

“What?!” It takes the innate muscle memory that came from years of riding motorcycles that keeps him from swerving into oncoming traffic. _Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera_ Gizmoduck? There’s no way.

He feels her shrug behind him. “It makes sense, right? He’s the only one who knows how to get a hold of Gizmoduck, and he makes all of Gizmoduck’s gizmos. He’s definitely smart enough to be Gizmoduck.”

“Go—Crimson Quackette, don’t be silly, Fenton works for Gizmoduck, he can’t be Gizmoduck too,” Darkwing brushes her off, steering the motorcycle towards the suspension beam that led up to the tower.

Fenton’s smart, of course he is—intimidatingly so, sometimes, for Darkwing, who never even finished community college—he has to be to work for Mr. McDuck. But having seen Gizmoduck in action, Darkwing just couldn’t imagine the bumbling, sometimes accident-prone, intern as the superhero.

He comes to a smooth stop on the platform in the tower, bakes squealing slightly.

“ _Oh, look, you survived,_ ” W.A.N.D.A. says upon their arrival.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised every time, W.A.N.D.A.,” he deadpans, dismounting the Ratcatcher.

“ _No, no, I had full confidence in your ability to fight a man who had complete control over barometric pressure_ and _lightning_.”

“W.A.N.D.A., Gizmoduck’s hurt!” Gosalyn says, flinging off her helmet and helping Darkwing heave Gizmoduck out of the sidecar.

“ _Gizmoduck? You called_ Gizmoduck _for help? Did I miss the report that the world’s ending?_ ”

“Next time I see Fenton, I’m having him reboot you,” Darkwing says darkly, laying the other superhero on the ground next to the Ratcatcher.

“ _You wouldn’t dare_.” The computer sounds as scandalized as a computer can.

“Can you help, W.A.N.D.A.?” Gosalyn asks impatiently, worry tinging her question as she wrings he hands slightly.

“ _Seeing as I don’t have a body, or a doctorate, it doesn’t seem likely, now, does it_?” Before Darkwing can retort—because, honestly, Gosalyn’s looking worried enough as it is, they don’t _need_ W.A.N.D.A.’s attitude now—she continues, pulling up a basic schematic of the Gizmosuit, “ _Gizmosuit, inventor: Gyro Gearloose. Cybernetic armor worn by Gizmoduck. Was the core processor overloaded by anything_?”

“Like lightning?” Gosalyn asks. “He was shot with, like, a lot of lightning.”

“ _I’d say that’s a possibility, then_. _The core processor is located in the back panel of the helmet. You want to check that first for damage._ ”

Looks like the helmet’s coming off, then.

“Okay, Gizmoduck, I don’t know what the protocol for something like this is, but you’ve been unconscious for, like, a really long time, so I’m just gonna take your helmet off, okay?” Darkwing waits, hoping the other superhero will answer, because revealing a fellow superhero’s secret identity, even Gizmoduck’s, feels wrong. “Don’t worry,” he continues, needlessly. “The bad guy’s been taken care of.”

“By the Crimson Quackette,” Gosalyn says, watching from the couch, a false bravado masking her concern.

“I think we can share the credit,” Darkwing mutters under his breath, giving the helmet a fruitless tug. “What, is this fused together? How do you get out of this thing, Giz? Do you have a screwdriver or something, Quackette?”

Before Gosalyn can reach into the pocket of her quiver, the Gizmoduck suit is whirring to life, emblem blazing, and Gizmoduck shouts, “Blathering blatherskite!”

The suit falls away from the duck, who rolls out, gasping and coughing, scrubbing a hand down his face. Pausing, he squints around the tower. “Oh, I’m not back at the lab, am I?”

Darkwing feels his jaw drop as Gosalyn lets out a delighted squeak. “Fenton?”

“Oh…hey, Darkwing,” Fenton says, running his hands through his hair, eyes darting around. “Glad to see the tower’s working out, how’s W.A.N.D.A., any glitches?”

“ _I resent that_.”

“Now, I’m sure you have a lot of questions, vis-á-vis me being in the Gizmoduck suit, but there’s a totally logical and completely believable explanation for that—”

“Is it because you’re Gizmoduck?” Gosalyn asks, tilting her head.

Fenton pauses, hands frozen in the air, mid-gesture. “I didn’t think this far ahead, honestly, so…yes, I’m Gizmoduck.”

“I knew it!” she says again, shooting a pointed look at Darkwing, and he has to give it to her—she’d figured it out before he did.

But seriously. _Fenton_? No way he could’ve seen that coming.

“I’m hoping I can rely on your discretion, both of your discretion, as superheroes, to keep my secret identity, you know, a secret…I’m sorry, are you a kid?” Fenton asks, looking down at Gosalyn.

She raises an eyebrow back at him. “I’m sorry, are _you_ the one who just revealed his secret identity to total strangers?”

“Gotta side with the kid, Gizmoduck,” Darkwing says. “You woke up yelling the apparent code that controls the suit, without even checking out where you were.”

“Yeah, being knocked out like that...not great for the processor-slash-brain,” Fenton says distractedly, turning over pieces of the armor, examining it for damage.

“Keen gear!” Gosalyn’s eyes light up. “This thing’s hooked up to your _brain_? Grandpa always wondered how it was controlled.”

“Yup! The brain’s the best processor you have.”

“So, if there’d been damage to the core processor…?” Darkwing almost doesn’t want to finish the question because there’s only one answer to that, right?

Fenton waves a hand. “Oh, not to worry about that. Dr. Gearloose and I reinforced the protective lining in the helmet, so the processor can’t be damaged. Well, it _can_ , but it’ll take more than…What was I hit with again?”

“…Lightning?” Gosalyn says it like a question, but her eyes shine with every new piece of information she learns about the Gizmosuit that would make a lesser hero than Darkwing jealous.

“Hm. That's new. He must still be mad about the last time we fought. But at least it didn’t do any damage to the suit…” Opening a panel in one of the chest pieces, Fenton’s beak curls at the plume of smoke that emits from inside. “Okay, it did some damage, but just to the torso, so _¡bueno!_ Do you have, uhm, some pliers and a soldering iron?”

Climbing off the couch, Gosalyn runs to her room. “Hang on, I’ll get my toolkit!”

Her feet pound against the floor as she leaves Darkwing and Gizmo—Fenton, that’s still weird to think about—alone in the room.

Darkwing tugged at the sleeves of his coat. He’d had plenty of conversations with Fenton as Darkwing Duck before, but that was before he knew his secret.

“So, uh,” he clears his throat. “Nice fighting out there, Gizmoduck.”

The younger duck looks up, startled, as though he’d forgotten Darkwing was still in the room. “Oh! Oh, thanks! You too, Darkwing. I’ve never actually seen you in action before, but you’re pretty handy with that grappling hook. And the gas gun. Do you need more cannisters or anything?”

“No, not yet, thanks.” Darkwing had never understood how quickly Fenton’s mind worked, but, now, with his own mind reeling with the events, he had an even harder time keeping up.

“Oh,” Fenton says, patting his pockets, mind clearly jumping ahead to another subject, leaving Darkwing behind. Unearthing a notebook, he flips to a page and starts writing in it. “Need to add you to the list.”

“The…list?” Darkwing asks.

Gosalyn reemerges, handing Fenton her toolkit. “Here you go!”

“Perfect! Thanks,” Fenton says, opening the kit and pulling out the soldering iron Darkwing didn’t even know Gosalyn had. “Oh, and it’s just the list of people who know I’m Gizmoduck. Darkwing, and…Crimson Quackette, right? I think I made your bow,” he trails off as he writes.

Instead of answering, Gosalyn gives Darkwing a pointed look, jerking her head to Fenton. He shrugs, shaking his head. _What?_

She gestures to their masks, then to Fenton, writing in his notebook.

Darkwing shakes his head, more forcefully now. “No!” he mouths.

“Yes,” she mouths back, nodding. With Fenton’s back turned, she moves closer to him. “He told us,” she whispers.

“By _accident_ ,” he hisses back. “Secret identities are secret for a reason.”

“Oh, come on,” she wheedles. “Who’s he gonna tell?”

“He has a whole list of everyone who knows he’s Gizmoduck. Forgive me if I’m not confident.”

“Well, _I_ trust him. Do you not trust me?”

He gives her a dry look. “Wow. You really went there, huh?”

That’s all the answer she needs, if the proud smirk on her face is anything to go by.

“Wait, Fenton,” he says, tugging his mask off. “Don’t put Darkwing. It’s Drake. Drake Mallard.”

“Launchpad’s boyfriend?” Fenton asks, brow furrowed. “Oh, actually that makes a lot of sense…”

Before Drake can read too much into that, Gosalyn’s taking off her mask as well, chirping, “I’m Gosalyn!”

“And, of course, you can trust us to keep your secret identity,” Drake says, making a valiant effort to not look at the list of everyone who also knew Fenton is Gizmoduck— _wait, did Launchpad know?_ —which looked far too long for comfort. “We know how important that is.”

“Right, Launchpad said you were an actor?" Fenton sets aside the notebook to return to fixing the Gizmosuit, accepting the soldering iron from Gosalyn. "Anything I know?"

Not since _Darkwing: First Darkness_ was scrapped. That was supposed to be his big break. “Probably not, some commercials, a couple of T.V. spots, mostly stunt work…”

“ _The Young and the Brainless_! That’s where I know you from,” Fenton says, snapping his fingers. “You played an intern at the hospital, right?”

Drake blanches while Gosalyn giggles. He’d been a young and starving actor and just desperate enough to audition for the role. Plus, it’d been a two-episode job, which was more than he’d been able to get at the time.

“Darkwing Duck was in a soap opera? Wait, no, Gizmoduck _watches_ soap operas? I don’t know which answer I need first.” Gosalyn’s climbed onto the couch and, hanging off the back, she watches them with wide eyes and an even wider grin.

“Well,” Fenton says, rubbing the back of his head. “M’ma’s favorite _telenovela_ did a crossover arc, so she watched the whole season.”

“Doesn’t explain why _you_ know about it,” she says, a gleam in her eye.

Drake waves his hands, unsure of how this conversation so quickly derailed. “Okay, I think we’re all forgetting that I also played Darkwing Duck in the _First Darkness._ Well, almost. Technically, it was scrapped after the studio exploded. But I’m on the poster!”

“Oh, yeah, I don’t watch superhero movies,” Fenton says somewhat dismissively. “The science just isn’t believable.”

“The…science?” Drake asks. He’d never really considered science as part of superhero movies, but Fenton seems awfully sure of himself.

Dropping the soldering iron, Fenton asks, rapid-fire, “How does a pig become radioactive? And how does that pig then pass on those radioactive powers to a spider, turning it into an anthropomorphic pig with the abilities and powers of a spider? The science just doesn’t check out!” Fenton makes a lot of agitated hand gestures while explaining, only stopping when he notices Gosalyn and Drake staring. He folds his arms over his chest, tucking his hands under his armpits. “Dr. Gearloose may have run some experimental tests. Don’t tell him I told you that,” he adds quickly.

Drake cocks his head at Fenton, still not sure what to make of the whole “Gizmoduck-is-actually-Launchpad’s-and-sort-of-my-friend-Fenton-Crackshell-Cabrera-and-maybe-hating-him-isn’t-logical-anymore” reveal. Not to mention the analysis of Peter Porker and the fact that Gyro Gearloose, someone who absolutely shouldn’t be dealing with radioactive _anything,_ has—apparently—been doing exactly that.

Gosalyn’s grin impossibly grows wider. “Best. Night. _Ever_.”

~*~

"Wait, was it 537 or 538? Or 39? Are we even on the right street?" Drake asks as they turn down Avian Way, his neck craned.

"Oh, I got it written down here, DW!" LP says, turning over his hands before tugging up one sleeve of his jacket. "Here it is! Uh...Gos, what do you think this says?” Launchpad asks, twisting so he can show Gosalyn his hand, where he’s written the address.

She studies it very seriously for a moment before she says, “This look like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,” she says decisively.

“How do you know what Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics look like?” Drake asks, looking at her in the rearview mirror.

She shrugs. “Webby lent me a book.”

Launchpad nods like this is totally normal information for two ten-year-old girls to have and Drake vows to spend more time getting to know the McDuck Manor children.

He spots the familiar townhouse with the neat yard. "Right, it's 37," he says, turning into the driveway to the townhouse.

Gosalyn sits up, pressing her hands to the window. "Where are we? This place looks suspiciously nice."

Drake winces a little as Launchpad gives him a look from the passenger seat. Yeah, he definitely should've told her before now, but he'd thought it'd be a nice surprise to tell her at the house.

He’d finally decided that, while perfect for scoping out crime, the tower wasn’t exactly a good living space, especially with a curious almost-ten-year-old running around. 

(Seriously, they didn't even have actual _walls_ to their rooms, which had started to put a serious cramp in his love life. Plus, he had some possible, _far_ future, plans that will go a lot smoother if he has a permanent address for Gosalyn.)

They weren’t too far from the bridge, though, of course—the townhouse is still in sight of the tower, and the attic has large windows that point right to it. 

And the house is in a good district with a good school that's nothing like the snobby private school he went to at her age, with a good STEM program and a co-ed hockey team. 

He turns the engine off. "Well..."

A small, sharp inhale is the only warning he gets before she grabs his shoulder and yanks him around enough to look at her. "Is this another foster home?" she asks. Her voice is low and steady, but there's just a hint of a waver, the tiniest of sheen in her eyes, and _yup_ , he should've done this sooner. 

"No, no, no, no, Gosalyn, no!" he rushes to reassure her. "No. This is...my house."

She falls back in her seat, his words shocking any emotion off her face. "You have a house? Why do you have a house, we live in the tower?" she asks, brow furrowed.

Well, at least she's not on the verge of tears anymore. "And now we'll live in an actual house!" Drake says, trying for upbeat.

"But...why?"

Before Drake can dig himself into a deeper hole, Launchpad opens his door, gesturing to the yard. "Check out the driveway, Gosalyn! Better than the tower for roller hockey, yeah?"

Gosalyn follows him out of the car, her hands shoved into her hoodie, eyeing the house with suspicion. "I guess."

"And—and look, we're not that far from the tower, see?" Drake says, pointing past the line of houses, where the Audubon Bay Bridge is still visible. "So we're still close to go on patrol."

Although, if he could get through this conversation, he definitely had another, much more difficult conversation about not taking her out on patrol on school nights. 

She turns on her heel, narrowing her suspicious look on him. "Why do you have a house, Drake? You love your super secret lair."

He looks around wildly for a moment, hands outstretched, taking in the empty street before saying, "Yeah, _secret_. And it's not like we're giving up the tower, we're just not gonna live there full-time."

"Yeah, but _why_?" she asks, frustration clearly building.

Launchpad sits on the front steps, watching them with wide eyes, looking like he wants to interject, but not sure how to.

“Well, I can’t really put ‘Audubon Bay Bridge’ on your enrollment paperwork, can I?" Drake says indelicately, any speech he'd practiced and about how he's just trying to do the right thing by her completely flying out of his head. "What school would believe that?”

Gosalyn throws her hands up, clearly in shock. "Wait, _school_? I'm going to school now? Since when?" 

"It's almost August, and I know you missed out at the end of last year. You're nine, Gos, you should be in school." 

“Okay, well, Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby are homeschooled. Why can’t Mrs. B and Donald just teach me, too?”

He'd considered it, even talked to Launchpad about talking to Donald, but the McDuck Manor is way out on the edge of town, and Gosalyn already spends more time in the tower than kids her own age, even with the triplets and Webby.

Gosalyn doesn't give him a chance to answer. "Look, I'm fine with living in the tower, so just give the house back, or whatever."

Oh, this isn't going at all how he'd planned. 

Taking a deep breath, Drake kneels in front of her. "We've been doing this for, what, four months now, Gosalyn? We're looking at a—" _Permanent_ is a strong word, and would definitely scare her. "—Long-term situation, here, and we can't keep living in the tower, kiddo. I'm just trying to make things a little more...normal while we also occasionally fight crime."

"Normal's overrated," she says with a shrug. "Why don't we just fight crime, forget about school, and when we find Grandpa, he can deal with all that? Why do you even care?"

Before he can answer, explain that he does care, cares much more about the duckling than he ever anticipated, a booming voice comes from across the yard. “Well, howdy, neighbor!”

They startle at the greeting, Gosalyn instinctively moving behind Drake as he drops a hand to her shoulder.

A loud duck in a loud Hawaiian shirt waves from the short fence dividing the two front yards. Only LP waves back. “Herb Muddlefoot. Looks like we’re gonna be neighbors!”

H'boy. 

~*~

His phone buzzes and Drake swats at it until it stops, shoving his face back into his pillow.

A heavy arm drapes over his waist and LP's voice rumbles in his ear. "Who's that?"

"No one," Drake says, shaking his head and curling closer to him. "G'back to sleep." 

"Mm." Launchpad nuzzles his shoulder, and Drake feels himself drifting off again.

Only for his phone to start buzzing once again with another call. 

Muttering a few choice words, Drake lifts LP's arm off of him and rolls over, picking up his phone, swiping the screen to accept the call. 

"'Lo?" Drake grumbles into the phone, not bothering to lift his head from his pillow. He and Launchpad had a long night on patrol, only stumbling in the door long enough for Drake to down three cups of coffee and turn around and drive Gos to school. 

It's now... _Ugh_ , two hours later. Whoever's calling better have a good reason.

"Mr. Mallard?" He squints an eye open at the vaguely familiar creaky voice.

He lifts himself up on an elbow, causing LP to shift, rolling over and looking up at him. "Speaking," he says gruffly.

"Hi, this is Mrs. Moonroe, the secretary at St. Canard Elementary."

That wakes him up. Drake sits up the rest of the way. "Is there a problem? Is Gosalyn okay?"

Launchpad sits up as well, looking at him with a furrowed brow. 

There's a pause on the line and he feels his stomach drop. It's one of _those_ phone calls then. He sighs. "Miss McCaw wants to see me?" 

"Yes, sir. Gosalyn set a pig loose in the boys' bathroom today."

Drake's beak drops to his chest. Of course she did. Gosalyn still hadn't exactly adjusted the whole "getting back into school" thing, even with Honker from next door to help with the transition. This is the third call he's gotten to the principal's office since she's been enrolled. "Yeah, okay. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"Thank you, Mr. Mallard."

"Thank you, Mrs. Moonroe." He hangs up his phone, dropping it on the pillow and digging the heel of his palm into his eye, sighing. 

LP props his head up on his hand. "What's up?" 

"Gosalyn let a pig loose in the boys' bathroom at school," Drake deadpans, with a slight groan, slumping back against the pillows and burrowing back into his boyfriend's chest a moment.

Launchpad's arm wraps around him. "How...How did she get a pig?"

"I don't _know_ ," Drake says with a whine, rolling out of LP's embrace and picking up the first shirt he can reach. "But she's definitely grounded."

~*~

Drake sighs tiredly as he steps through the door to their townhouse, dawn breaking over the Audubon Bay.

Shrugging out of his civilian coat—it’s easier to sneak in and out of the house not dressed as Darkwing Duck—he hangs it up in the front closet and scrubs his hands through his hair.

He’s got about three hours before Gos has to be at school, and, in true preteen fashion, she’s a monster to get up and out the door in the morning, so any amount of sleep he can get between patrol and drop-off is desperately needed.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Drake winces as he rolls his shoulder. He and LP had stopped a jewelry store robbery, and one of the would-be robbers had started firing a gun and the bullet caught him in the collarbone, stopped by the Kevlar vest under the coat. He’s mostly sure nothing’s broken, but his left side smarts with every movement.

Opening the door to Gosalyn’s room, he peers in the dim glow of the fairy lights she always leaves plugged in. It’s as messy as ever, toys and clothes and stray arrows and hockey equipment creating a veritable minefield between the door and her bed.

Except there is no Gos in bed.

Panic seizes him before he can process much else, and he’s stumbling down the stairs two at a time. Drake had instituted a “no patrol on school nights” rule once he’d enrolled Gosalyn and figured out how—well, asked Fenton if it was possible—to install W.A.N.D.A. in the house as a sort of fail-safe for events such as this. Only, he’d never dreamed there’d be a time he’d need it.

Tripping over the last step, he’s sent sprawling into the couch, shoving it forward a couple inches.

Drake bites back a whine, holding his shoulder, and pulls himself to his feet. His collarbone’s not broken, but definitely, definitely bruised.

A lump on the couch he’d missed on his way in moves and Gosalyn’s messy bedhead pokes out from under the blanket. “Drake?” she mutters, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Gosalyn?” The vice loosens around his heart a little, but he can’t seem to stop it from pounding in his ears. He leans against the back of the couch, hopes his internal panic doesn’t show on his face. “Kiddo, what are you doing down here? You’re supposed to be in bed.”

She sat up, wrapping the blanket around her. “Waitin’ for you,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Heard ‘bout the jewelry store on the scanner. Sounded bad. Didja get ‘em?” Gosalyn asks, leaning against the back of the couch, already nodding off again.

Drake looks past her to see her phone on the coffee table, open to the police scanner, and her crossbow and Quackette costume are next to it, like she’d been planning a way to join them.

Okay, so he’s definitely deleting the police scanner app off her phone. Again. But he feels the chain of panic fall away from his heart and a warm fondness curl in its place.

“Yeah, we got ‘em, Gos. I’ll tell you about it at breakfast, okay? But now it’s time for bed, yeah?”

Gosalyn’s head bobs, but she makes no attempt to move from her nest on the couch. Smiling softly, Drake picks her up, gathering the bundle of duckling and blanket in his arms. “Alright, come here, sweetheart,” he says, settling her head on his good side. If she were more awake, she’d roll her eyes at the nickname, but now she cuddles into him, arms wrapping around his neck, reciprocating his touch far more comfortably than she had when she first moved in.

"Wait," she protests, turning her head to look over his shoulder. "Where's LP?" She searches the dark living room for him, as though he might be hiding somewhere in the shadows. 

Drake rubs her back. "He's okay, hon, he just had to go back to Duckberg tonight. You'll see him tomorrow before patrol."

"Mm, okay," she sighs.

She’s warm and sleepy, her hair and feathers soft and sweet-smelling from her shampoo. One hand fists loosely in the back of his shirt and her tangled braid—miraculously still intact from when he’d braided it before leaving for patrol—shifts over his shoulder.

Adjusting her and the blanket so it can’t tangle around his feet and he doesn’t take another tumble down the stairs, Drake notices she’s wrapped herself up in the Darkwing blanket he knitted something like five years back, maybe? Feels like a lifetime now, after his top surgery, when he was still slogging his way through minimum wage jobs and accepting whatever two-bit script he could get his hands on.

Once he’s ensured that she’s secured, he hums softly as he carries her up to her room.

She pushes off his shoulder, blinking sleepily at him. “That’s my lullaby,” Gosalyn says, not accusing, more curious.

“Yeah,” Drake says slowly. He’s heard her humming it to herself before, when she thought he couldn’t hear her, but never asked, hoping maybe she’d tell him about it herself. “That okay?”

She hums, a little non-committedly, and lays her head back on his shoulder. “S’okay. Don’t know the words, though.”

“I don’t know your words,” he says without thinking.

Suddenly, Gosalyn is much more awake. “You made up words for my lullaby?” she asks, straightening up so quickly, she nearly cracks her head on the underside of his beak.

“Oh, look, your room, where you should definitely go back to sleep,” Drake says, nudging her door open with his foot. “School in three hours, math quiz, hockey practice…” he trails off, plopping her on her bed.

“Nooo…” she pushes her bangs out of her face. “Wanna hear.”

“ _Bed_.”

“What? Mr. Actor can’t handle anything that’s not one-liners and monologues?” There’s a challenge in her voice and a smirk on her beak, even as she can’t keep her eyes open.

“Okay, little miss.” He pokes her forehead, pushing her so she tipped backwards on to her pillow.

Wiggling under her comforter, Gosalyn gives him an expectant look. Drakes sits on the edge of the bed, feeling apprehensive. He’d only been half-serious when he said he had words to her lullaby. After over eight months, he should know better than to challenge Gosalyn to call his bluffs.

Clearing his throat awkwardly, he tugs the cuffs the of his shirt. “Uhm.”

She squirms, squinting at him through one eye grumpily. “ _Drake_.”

“ _Gosalyn_ ,” he mimics, tugging her comforter over her shoulder. Okay, he could do this. He’s taken plenty of improv classes. “ _Come paint…your dreams on your pillow. I’ll be near, to chase away fear. So…rest now and dream ‘til tomorrow. I’ll be near, to chase away fear. So rest now and dream ‘til tomorrow…_ ”

The last word hangs in the still air between them a moment, and Drake inexplicably holds his breath, like he’s really weighing the opinion of a ten-year-old over his silly lullaby.

“Mm,” she sighs finally, curling on her side, her eyes fluttering closed and breath evening out. “Grandpa’s is better.” There’s a smile in her voice, however, undercutting any abrasiveness she’d intended.

Snorting, Drake exhales and cards his hand through her hair. “Yeah, you’re probably right, Gos.” Yawning, he stretches, stands, and walks to the door, tripping over Gosalyn’s skates before catching himself on the doorframe.

The noise rouses Gosalyn, enough for her to murmur, “‘ll teach you his t’morrow.”

A lump forms in his throat, and Drake nods, even though she can’t see him, and pulls her door to.

~*~

Drake groans, blinking his eyes open in the dim light. Experience—as well as the scratchy bed sheets, thin mattress, and heart monitor—tells him he’s in the hospital. He takes a quick, mental assessment of his injuries.

Right off the bat, he feels like he’s been run over by a bus before the bus backed up and ran over him again. Then Gosalyn’s team got out and pummeled him with their sticks. Everything hurts and feels heavy, even trying to keep his eyes open feels like a losing battle.

He starts to sink back into the pillow, deciding it isn’t a battle worth fighting, when a thought flits back through his mind.

_Gosalyn_.

Where’s Gosalyn? It’s Friday night, she’d been on patrol with him.

He shoots up, looking around wildly, only then realizing how sore his ribs feel and the sling his arm’s in. He can feel a bandage pulling tight around his leg and there’s something heavier that might be a cast, but none of that matters unless he can find…

Something shifts in the bed that’s not him, and that’s when Drake finally looks down and sees that the weight on his leg is actually Gosalyn, curled up on top of the blanket between him and the bed guard, asleep. She doesn’t look hurt, just exhausted.

He breathes a sigh of relief and settles against the pillow again. It doesn’t bode well, necessarily, in terms of how long he’d been out, that she’d fallen asleep alongside him in the hospital bed. They’d been as careful as they could be with all the getting dangerous, but Drake and Launchpad had taken their lumps and ended up in the hospital a few times. After their last visit, when Gosalyn had refused to even leave the Thunderquack when they’d both had been hurt, he’d discovered just how deeply she despised hospitals.

She didn’t remember much about her parents, having been so, so young when they passed, but she remembered waiting in the hospital with her grandpa. Gosalyn hated everything about hospitals—the disinfectant smell, the fluorescent lights, the sound of the equipment.

Stroking her hair back from her face, Drake thinks back to their patrol, trying to remember what happened that landed them here.

“Let’s get dangerous…I am the terror that flaps in the night…” he sputters out a breath. “Definitely a bad guy and a fight. I think there was…a magician? No, that can’t be right.”

“No, he was definitely a magician,” Gosalyn grumbles, pressing her face into his side for a moment, rubbing her cheek against the blanket. After a moment, she sits up, eyes wide. “You’re awake!”

She throws herself in his lap, and Drake just barely holds back an indignant squawk of _watch the ribs!_

Because if she’s being this affectionate, after falling asleep in a hospital, no less, he must have worried her pretty badly.

Gosalyn pulls back, enough so she can see him, but close enough they’re still beak to beak, and narrows teary eyes at him. “Wait, you know who I am, right?”

Tilting his head in confusion, Drake says, slowly, “Gosalyn Waddlemeyer. Or has Gyro been cloning again? He’s done that before.”

Instead of answering, she flings her arms around his neck once again. “Good. People always wake up in hospitals with no memories on T.V.”

“Gosalyn, what did I say about watching _telenovelas_ with Fenton?” he asks, huffing out a laugh and finally shifting her so she’s tucked under his arm not in a sling.

She goes without complaint but remains close to him. “That I can’t if I believe everything I watch,” she recites dismissively. “Although, I do know triplets, and one of them is evil, so maybe _telenovelas_ got something right.”

“Which one’s the evil triplet again?” Drake’s most familiar with Dewey, Launchpad’s best friend of the Duck triplets, but he’s been trying to make an effort the more time Gosalyn spends at the mansion.

“Louie. Green hoodie.”

“Oh, the triplet you spend the most time with is evil, that’s comforting.” She giggles, a sound that relaxes him further. A giggly Gos is certainly preferably to a teary one, even if it’s at his expense. Shifting his arm in the sling, Drake asks, “Alright, some of it’s still coming back to me, what’s this about a magician?”

“Oh, him. Some Beagle Boys were robbing an armored car and one of them had this whole magic schtick thing going on. Black cape, earring…”

“Black Arts Beagle? That hack?” Drake groans. “I did _not_ lose a fight to that gig-stealing, sleight-of-hand trickster. Is he still going by that ridiculous stage name? ‘I made the C’s disappear’,” he says in a mocking tone. “That’s not even clever!”

“No, you definitely won, his brothers just beat you up a bunch first. Wait.” Gosalyn sits up, eyes glinting with glee. “What do you mean, ‘gig-stealing’? And why do you know so much about him?”

As usual, his mouth had run off without his even realizing. He really didn’t have a desire to explain any pre-superhero jobs he may or may not have had that included running in the birthday party entertainment circles. “It’s possible, Gosalyn,” he says slowly. “That I wasn’t very cool before you met me.”

“Drake,” she says, all seriousness. “I think you’re overestimating how cool I think you are now.”

“ _Hey_!” he squawks, trying to grab her as she crawls to the end of the bed, laughing at his indignation.

Curling her legs under her, Gosalyn pulls her phone from her pocket. Tapping on the screen a moment, she says, “I’ll be back. Launchpad forgot what room we’re in.”

She climbs over the railing, passing a nurse who’s entering.

“Good evening, Mr. Mallard,” he says, picking up the chart at by the door. “How are we feeling tonight?”

“Like I’m ready to go home,” Drake says, shifting the sling once again.

The nurse, who’s nametag reads Jason, chuckles. “Your daughter said you’d say that. Well, your tests look good, no sign of a concussion. Your shoulder was dislocated, and you’ve got a pretty nasty burn on your leg, so just take it easy the next couple of days.”

“Yeah, I don’t do ‘taking it easy’ well,” he mutters. Then something Jason said before finally registers with him, and he asks, “Wait, who said?”

Jason hooks a thumb over his shoulder, towards the door. “Your daughter? The kid in here before? She said you all weren’t fans of hospitals, so as soon as you were awake, you’d be ready to leave. And after I check your vitals, you’ll be good to discharge, sound good?”

It’s not necessarily the first time someone’s assumed Gosalyn was his daughter, but after the last few months, it’d started feeling more like the three of them had become their own little family. Launchpad had started spending more and more time in St. Canard with him and Gosalyn, and they’d fallen into a comfortable routine of nightly patrols working around Gosalyn’s hockey schedule, getting her ready for school, weekly movie nights, singing her lullaby, making big breakfasts on Sunday, and…

And now he wants to go home with his family, with his boyfriend and his—daughter almost feels too small a word, and he knows he doesn’t deserve a parental title, not yet—Gosalyn.

“Yeah,” Drake says, nodding. “Sounds good.”

~*~

He wakes up, well past noon, to a heavy, acrid smell wafting in from the kitchen. The smoke curls in his beak and Drake throws back the covers, rushing down the stairs, only to find the kitchen filled with a hazy smoke.

Gosalyn stands in a chair over the stove, frantically waving her hands. There’s something burnt in the pan in front of her.

“Gosalyn! What are you doing?” he asks frantically, not waiting for her to answer before he’s rounding the counter, shoving the chair with his foot to get her out of the way.

“I didn’t mean to!” she wails.

“W.A.N.D.A., this is something you should wake me up for!” Drake says, yanking the skillet from the burner and dropping it in the sink.

“ _Don’t get snippy with me_ ,” she says back, and not for the first time, Drake curses Fenton for the whole “semi-sentient-British-mega-computer”. No matter how well she tracks down criminals, her attitude left something to be desired. “ _She didn’t set off any alarms, or technically set anything on fire_.”

“Okay, we need to reboot your standards for what constitutes an emergency,” he mutters, using the spatula to try and scrape the…blackened block clinging to his pan.

“ _I heard that._ ”

Giving up and leaving the pan in the sink, Drake settles for letting it soak and hopes it’s enough to salvage it before turning to Gosalyn. “What are you doing?” he asks again, calmer now that the smoke has cleared and there’s no danger of the kitchen actually going up in flames.

“There’s something wrong with your book!” Gosalyn says, stamping her foot in frustration, still standing on the chair, hands on her hips. She’s wearing her purple sleep shirt and covered head-to-toe with flour and there’s something sticky matting the feathers of her cheek together.

“My book?” It’s only then that Drake realizes that there’s a copy of _Let’s Get Flavorous_ on the counter next to the stove, splattered with what he thinks flour and eggs. “What were you doing with my book?”

He’d sold exactly two copies of his self-published cookbook, and he knew for a fact that both copies went to: one) Launchpad, and two) Launchpad when he accidentally set the first copy on fire, and he wouldn’t have even sold them to LP if he’d known his boyfriend was the one buying them. He hadn’t even realized anyone else had opened the book.

Gosalyn scrubs unsuccessfully at her cheek, avoiding his eye. He recognizes it immediately for what it is—a tell, and one that says she’s thinking carefully about her next words.

“Makin’ breakfast,” she says nonchalantly, shrugging a shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” he says, wetting a rag and wiping at her cheek. “I see that. And why were you making breakfast and burning down the kitchen? We have cereal, you know.”

Batting at his hand, Gosalyn squirms away from him, hopping from the chair to the counter. “Wanted something special.”

Giving up on whatever she’d managed to get on her face—she had hockey practice later, he’d throw her in the shower after—Drake leans against the counter. “It’s not your birthday, right?” he asks, even though he knows her birthday was three months back.

She huffs, rolling her eyes. “ _No_.”

“It’s not my birthday. And it’s not Launchpad’s birthday,” he muses.

“It’s not a big deal, Dad. I just wanted pancakes.”

They both freeze at her words. Gosalyn's eyes are wide and her beak is clamped shut.

Drake's heart leaps into his throat. "Did you just call me 'Dad'?"

"No!" she says, far too quickly.

He grins. “You did! You called me 'Dad' and you tried to make pancakes yourself instead of waiting for me to get up.”

She scootches away from him on the counter, almost knocking over one of the mixing bowls still out next to her. "Shut up!" 

He stops teasing her as she curls her legs under her, hiding her face from him. Leaning his forearms on the counter, he reaches out and pokes her leg. "Hey, kiddo, I'm sorry."

She peeks at him through her fingers. 

"C'mon, talk to me, Gos." 

Gosalyn slowly lowers her hands and he gives her a smile, wiggling his shoulders a little, which causes her to snort and roll her eyes.

“It’s been a year since I moved in,” she says by way of explanation. “And that’s what families do, right? Celebrate special occasions, or whatever?” she says it with a nonchalant shrug, but she’s tugging at the hem of her night shirt and not really looking at him. “And we’re, you know. A family. You, me, and Launchpad. Right?”

Something softens in Drake, and he slides up next to her at the counter, wrapping his arm around her. Of course he knew it’d been a year since he asked Gosalyn to move in, but that also meant a whole year had passed and they were no closer to finding her grandpa, so he’d been waiting to see how she reacted before making a big deal.

Like the meeting he hasn't told her about, yet, with Scrooge's lawyers about what it would take for him to adopt Gosalyn.

Because they were a family—Drake can't even remember the time before Bulba, before Gosalyn was in his life, before hockey schedules and braids and lullabies and big Sunday breakfasts—and the title "guardian" just wasn't cutting it anymore.

“Yeah. Definitely a family, sweetheart,” he says. Not all that long ago, she would have rolled her eyes or made a face and griped good-naturedly about him being “too mushy”.

This time, though, she hugs him back, clinging tight to him. “Yeah?” Her voice is soft, muffled against his shoulder, and Drake squeezes her tighter.

“Yeah,” he says firmly, planting a kiss on top her of her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, Drake didn’t use to be an unlicensed Darkwing Duck impersonator and work kid’s birthday parties where he ran into Nik Nokturne. That would be preposterous...... 
> 
> Next chapter is Gosalyn's perspective! I’d love to know what you think! come say hi on tumblr! @wordshakerofgallifrey
> 
> xx


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gosalyn hasn't been able to let anyone in, not since Grandpa. But Drake's not her social worker, or the four...five sets of foster parents who have called her a problem child. He teaches her to fight crime and takes care of her and he just might be the closest thing to family she's had since Grandpa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the love on the last chapter!! I hope Gos’ chapter lives up to the wait!

Gosalyn sits curled up on the couch, watching over the back as Darkwing says goodbye to Dewey and Launchpad.

“Bye, Drake! Thanks for the exclusive!” Dewey says, waving his phone and darting out the door.

Drake. It’s the first time she’s heard his actual name in the past two days. It makes him sound much cooler than he is, with his purple plaid shirt and bumbling awkwardness outside of the cape.

She vaguely wonders if he ever changed it—he was an actor before, it makes sense—but even that feels too cool for him.

“See ya, DW,” Launchpad says softly, dropping a hand on Darkwing’s shoulder and squeezing. Darkwing smiles back, covering the hand on his shoulder briefly.

Gosalyn narrows her eyes at the scene. She hadn’t paid much attention the last couple days, too busy being worried about Grandpa and Bulba, but now she’s reminded of the Featherby’s, the third home she lived in after Grandpa. Mr. and Mr. Featherby had been probably one of the nicest families she stayed with, and they’d acted a lot like Launchpad and Darkwing were now.

The door closes to the tower, and Darkwing comes back into the main living area, where Gosalyn’s still on the couch.

“So, I’ve been…kind of living here since I set up shop, so I only have the one bed,” he explains, rubbing the back of his neck. “You go ahead and take it today, we’ll figure out a place for you, too, get you a bed.”

She nods, even if she feels a little bad about taking his bed. But she’s so tired after fighting Bulba and losing Grandpa all over again. A real bed sounds perfect.

“Yeah, thanks. Night, Darkwing,” Gosalyn says, untucking herself from her corner of the couch and hopping off, heading towards the general direction of the bedroom.

“Night, Gosalyn.”

It’s late afternoon when she wakes up, momentarily confused to her surroundings, the tall windows overlooking the bay, the large bed, the _Darkwing Duck_ memorabilia…

Oh, that’s right. Grandpa disappeared into an alternate universe, and a superhero helped her sort of catch the bad guy who’s responsible for it, and she’s his crime-fighting partner now, and slept in his super-secret superhero lair last night.

Yeah, it’s definitely weirder when she puts it that way.

Changing out of her pajamas, she leaves the bedroom, heading for the main area, where W.A.N.D.A.’s monitor and the motorcycle and the couches are.

Darkwing’s sitting in front of the computer, plans for the Ramrod spread out in front of him. Some are in Grandpa’s handwriting, and some are unfamiliar.

She climbs up in the chair next to him. “Hey, Darkwing. What’s all this?”

He must not have heard her come in, because he flails, almost falling out of his chair and sending the stack of papers to the floor. “Whoa—! Oh, hey Gosalyn,” he says, using the desk to pull himself upright. “Sleep okay?” he asks, gathering the papers in one hand, shooting her a semi-worried look. 

“Yeah, I guess,” she says, shrugging a shoulder. There’s no reason to tell him about the hour she spent tossing and turning, or the nightmares she had, filled with red lightning. “Are these Grandpa’s Ramrod plans?”

Smoothing his hair back down, Darkwing nods. “Yeah, these are. Mr. McDuck let me have them before the new team went in to the lab. And these are the original Solego notes he based the Ramrod on. Do they look familiar?”

Gosalyn frowns, looking at the drawing of the lizard. She shakes her head. “No. That looks like the design on the key to the Ramrod, though,” she says, pointing to a circular design.

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” he says, picking up another sheet of Grandpa’s plans, one with a sketch of the key. “Not really sure what any of it means. Fenton and Dr. Gearloose—they work out of the Duckberg labs—have copies of these plans. They’re the one who’ll be recreating your grandpa’s designs, get a new Ramrod up and working. Our job is to make sure the originals stay safe.”

“And scour the scourge of St. Canard?” she asks, repeating something she heard him say when they went on patrol the night before. It’s a bit much on the alliteration, but it’s kinda fun to say.

Darkwing huffs a laugh at that. “Yes. Protect the Solego plans and scour the scourge of St. Canard. Although…”

Her stomach drops as he trails off. Is he about to tell her she can’t be his crime-fighting partner anymore? Make her stay in the tower while he does all the cool stuff? Or, worse, has Mrs. Cavanaugh started calling around, looking for her? She’s been gone from the home for three days, most kids would have come back on their own by now.

“If you’re gonna keep coming out with me on patrol, you’ll need a costume,” he finishes, unaware of her inner turmoil.

“I’m not wearing a cape,” she says, immediately, relief flooding her. He’s not telling her she can’t fight crime, Mrs. Cavanaugh’s not looking for her. It’s fine. “Or a hat bigger than my head.”

“What’s wrong with what I wear?” Darkwing squawks indignantly, and it makes her laugh, something she doesn’t do much anymore, and it sounds weird in her ears.

“Nothing’s _wrong_ with it,” she says, trying to stifle her giggles. “But why do I need a costume? Launchpad doesn’t have one.”

“Launchpad has a day job and won’t always come on patrol. You will. And as superheroes, we need to keep our identities secret. It’s dangerous, otherwise.”

Gosalyn raises an eyebrow at him. “Isn’t your whole thing ‘let’s get dangerous’?”

“Not when it comes to criminals tracking us down because they recognized us. You’ll at least need a mask,” he insists.

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing so terrifying to the criminal mind as the unknown,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows and clearly trying for mysterious, but just coming off as a dork.

“Yeah, okay, Darkwing,” she says, snorting.

Honestly, Gosalyn’s not sure he even notices that she only calls him Darkwing. LP calls him DW more than not. Maybe Darkwing thinks it’s just their thing as crime-fighting partners. It makes sense to use their superhero names.

But even Launchpad starts calling him Drake more and more often, in a soft and sappy voice—because, like she called it, they were totally dating—and maybe LP can get close enough to call Darkwing Drake, but Gosalyn just can’t let herself.

He’s not her family, there’s no reason to get that close.

~*~

_Stupid, stupid, stupid_ , she thinks, grabbing her crossbow, trying to ignore the sting behind her eyelids. Why did she have to tell him about the foster home?

Gosalyn shoots an arrow at the target Darkwing had set up for her to practice on.

She’d been upset about leaving her stuff at Mrs. Cavanaugh’s, but she hadn’t mean to _tell_ him about the foster homes—plural, because she’s, as her social worker so nicely put it, a “problem child”, and parents weren’t lining up to house her.

It’s stupid, but she doesn’t want _Darkwing_ thinking she’s a problem, or a bad kid, or anything. But her last tie to Grandpa, his old textbooks, her comics, the toolkit he gave her to work on her old bow, all of it’s gone, and she’s upset, and it all came spilling out and now he’s gonna send her back and she can kiss her super-cool, crime-fighting life goodbye.

He’s not her family, but he’s the sort of closest thing she’s had since Grandpa. Plus, she gets to be a superhero, which is basically the coolest thing ever! Going back to boring Mrs. Cavanaugh’s with the ugly doilies and the other “at-risk kids” and her life without Grandpa or superheroing?

Gosalyn didn’t want that.

 _Stupid_.

~*~

Gosalyn shivers under her duvet, wrapping it tighter around her. There’s a dull ache behind her eyes that’s spreading through her whole body, and a rasp in her throat like sandpaper.

Letting out a pathetic-sounding whimper, she rolls over, pressing her face into her pillow. She _can’t_ be sick. Crime-fighters don’t get sick.

There’s a light tapping on the divider that creates the sort-of rooms in the tower and Darkwing pokes his head in. “Gosalyn? Are you up?”

She tries to answer, but the words get stuck in her throat and give way to a dry, hacking cough. When it finally passes, she manages to croak out, “Hey, Darkwing.”

The bed dips next to her and she weakly lifts her head off her pillow. Darkwing gives her a worried look, pressing the back of his hand to her forehead. She almost recoils at the touch; it feels so much like Grandpa’s and he has no right to be so familiar, but she’s too tired to move.

“You feel warm,” he says, and Gosalyn wants to protest, because she’s still freezing. “Does anything hurt?”

“Head. Throat. Everything,” she says with a groan.

“Okay,” Darkwing says, still sounding worried. He smooths a hand down the blanket, and the weight shifts again as he stands. “I’ll be right back.”

She pulls the comforter over her head with a whine, the light streaming in through the window suddenly too bright.

A moment later, Gosalyn feels the bed dip once again. “C’mon, kiddo. Try and take some medicine, okay?”

Stubbornly, she shakes her head, keeping it firmly covered.

Darkwing shakes her gently. “Come on, Gos. It’ll be over quick, and you can go back to sleep, yeah?”

Going back to sleep did sound good, so, with a grumpy sigh, she sits up and accepts the medicine he offers her, swallowing it with a shudder.

“Ugh, grape flavor,” she says, curling her beak.

“I know. Here you go, wash it down,” he says, handing her a glass of orange juice _._ “Now, get some rest. I’ll try and track down some better medicine in the next few hours.”

“But…patrol,” she protests weakly, even though she feels absolutely miserable. There’s part of her that worries that if she can’t live up to the crime-fighting end of…whatever they call this, maybe Darkwing would get tired of her.

He gives her a sympathetic look. “Gosalyn, your only job now is to get better. Patrol will still be there when you’re not running fever.”

At least he doesn’t sound upset or anything. Gosalyn nods. “Yeah, okay,” she mutters.

Darkwing squeezes her leg through the blanket and stands. “Alright, well. Just let me know if you need anything, yeah?”

Nodding again, Gosalyn covers her head with the comforter and slips into a somewhat restless sleep.

She wakes up, feeling minorly better. Her head doesn’t ache so much, and it doesn’t hurt to swallow. Blackout curtains are haphazardly hung up, blocking out the afternoon sun so the room isn’t so bright.

Sitting up, she scrubs her face, noticing some other changes Darkwing made while she slept.

The TV’s been moved into her room and there’s a stack of DVDs on her dresser. Crawling to the edge of the bed, Gosalyn scootches off the side, expecting to see his _Darkwing Duck_ collection.

Instead, she finds some old horror movies she’s mentioned to him before, as well as a season of _Inspector Spacetime_.

She blinks hard, and opens her eyes, sure she’s imagining it. There’s no way he remembered this. She’s mentioned Grandpa’s favorite show once to him and LP, and that was so she could make fun of _Darkwing Duck_.

And that was weeks ago.

Gosalyn almost drops the DVDs when Darkwing sticks his head through what’s supposed to be the door to her room.

“Hey, you’re up,” he says, looking surprised. “How are you feeling?”

She shrugs. “If I say I’m better can I stop taking medicine?”

He gives her a look that clearly says _nice try_. “Not until your fever’s down,” he says, crossing the room to her and pressing the back of his hand to her head again.

This time, she lets him.

“You still feel a little warm, but I think your fever’s come down. One more dose, okay? Make sure it stays down. Don’t worry,” he says, when she makes a face. “I got cherry and watermelon this time. What’s your poison?”

“Poison’d taste better,” Gosalyn grumbles, sitting on the edge of the bed. Still, she accepts the watermelon-flavored medicine, because the sooner she gets better, the sooner she’ll be able to go back on patrol.

He takes the medicine from her, swapping her for another cup of juice. Nodding at the movies she’d forgotten she was still holding, he says, “Sorry, that’s the only season they had at the video store. I’m still haven’t figured out Netchix in the tower, so.” He shrugs a shoulder.

“No, this is great,” she says. “The tenth Inspector is me and Grandpa’s favorite. And I can’t believe you remembered these movies.”

He smiles, like he’s pleased he found the right movies for poor, sick Gosalyn. “Yeah? Well, good! So, you’ve taken your medicine, you’ve got your movies and juice. I’ll be in the main room if you need anything else, okay? I'm gonna order some food.”

Darkwing turns to leave, and she almost lets him, content on riding out the rest of her sick day alone. But she finds she doesn’t mind the attention or being taken care of. She hasn’t been this sick in the foster homes, but even the time at the McQuail’s, when all the kids had some kind of stomach bug, they’d just been shuffled up to their rooms and kept there until they stopped puking.

The fact that…Drake wants to make sure she’s comfortable and feeling okay and even got her her favorite movies to watch, is almost a foreign concept to her after all that time in foster care.

“Hey, D-Drake?” she says, holding a pillow to her chest.

He turns back to her, a raised eyebrow the only tell that he’s surprised she used his name. “Yeah, Gosalyn?”

“You…do you wanna stay and watch? If you can follow the science,” she adds with a weak smirk.

It’s a bit of an olive branch, her way of letting him in, just a little bit, like he did when he asked her to stay after the Ramrod exploded.

She hasn’t let anyone in since Grandpa disappeared and it’s a little scary—Darkwing…Drake’s…work is dangerous, just like Grandpa’s ended up being, more so, most nights. And, before, letting him in had felt like she’d betray Grandpa somehow.

But she thinks Grandpa would like him. He’s nice, and a little bit of a dork, like Grandpa, and Grandpa would like that he actually takes care of her, even when they’re on patrol and their whole thing is “let’s get dangerous”.

Darkwing—no, Drake—laughs a little, nodding. “Well, I’m a little rusty on aliens and robots, so you’ll have to explain it to me.”

She sighs, a long-suffering thing, that causes him to laugh again. “I _guess_ I can manage that.”

The only place to sit is the bed, so she scoots over to give him room. He sits mostly on the edge, one leg hanging off the side of the bed, and leans back against the headboard.

They watch quietly, the sounds of the show filling her room. She keeps pushing her hair out of her face as they watch, huffing in frustration. Her hair’s greasy and tangled and keeps falling in her face and she doesn’t have the energy to try and pull it back in its usual ponytail.

“I can braid your hair if you want, get it out of your face,” he offers after the fifth time she unsuccessfully pushed her hair out of her face.

She…didn’t expect that. Just to look at him, Dark—Drake, didn’t look like someone who knew how to braid hair.

But it’d be nice to get her hair out of her face, so scooting forward on the bed, Gosalyn nods. “Sure.”

“Okay, I only half-remember how to do this, but I’ll try, okay? And you have a lot more hair than I’m used to,” he says with a slight chuckle, sliding behind her on the bed. Reaching for her brush, he combs her hair back gently, twisting it into a braid.

The Inspector and Reggie fight Blorgons on the screen, and Gosalyn runs a hand over her duvet. The motions of Drake’s hands in her hair are unfamiliar—Grandpa may have been the city’s leading scientist, but even his vast knowledge never extended to hair—but they feel nice, and make her sleepy, though that could’ve been the medicine he keeps making her take.

“How’d you learn to braid hair?” she asks after a moment, trying to stay awake. She’s been sleeping _all day_ , she doesn’t want to fall asleep again.

He doesn’t answer at first, and the braiding stops. She twists around to look at him. He’s got a weird look on his face, and he’s holding her hair limply. When he notices her watching him, he gently nudges her to face forward again and continues braiding. “My mom taught me when I was younger. She used to braid it a lot, but I don’t remember any of the fancy braids anymore.”

“Your hair was long enough to braid?”

“Oh yeah, I had hair longer than yours when I was your age.”

For some reason, the thought of Drake with long hair makes her think of Grandpa’s records of bands older than she can imagine, with their shaggy haircuts he called… “Kinda like a mop-top?”

Drake squawks, causing Gosalyn to giggle. “How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know! I’m just trying to picture you with long hair. Doesn’t feel right.” She can’t picture him with anything other than the short, neat haircut he wore now, that never seems out of place, even after a long night on patrol.

“Yeah, didn’t feel right to me, either,” he says, picking up a hair tie from her nightstand, and wrapping it around the end of her braid. “Mom liked having someone to teach this stuff to, but. She really wanted a daughter to pass it on to, and I...wasn’t. It wasn’t until I was eighteen, though, that I finally cut it off and changed my name, so it fit me.”

He’s not saying it outright, and the hands smoothing down her braided hair are shaking ever-so-slightly, but Gosalyn knows what he’s trying to say. She’d known an older girl in one of the foster homes who’d been kicked out of her home for trying to be more like herself and coming out to her parents. She’d changed her name, too, like Drake.

The thought reminds her of something she thought when she’d moved in, about Drake changing his name for work. She’d been new to the tower and raw after losing Grandpa and the Ramrod and thought “Drake Mallard” sounded like a cheesy actor-y name, like Goldie Fawn or Matthew McSwanaughey.

She realizes, then, there might be more to Drake than she thought. He’s definitely braver than she’d given him credit for. And Drake Mallard sounds just right.

Picking up her phone, she turns on the camera, flipping it around so she can see her hair.

“I like Drake,” Gosalyn finally says. “It’s a good name. And I like the braid,” she adds, feeling uncharacteristically shy.

She catches his smile in her camera and he stops fussing with her hair so much. “Thank you,” he says, voice soft and sincere. A beat passes, and he moves on, shifting so he’s not behind her on the bed anymore. But he doesn’t move all the way back to the edge again, and Gosalyn finds she likes that much better. “Okay, so are these Blorgons robots or aliens? Because I can’t tell.”

“Alright, so here’s where it gets complicated…”

~*~

“What’s this?” Gosalyn asks, poking at what looks like a lightbulb on a weird-looking stand. She jumps back when the lightbulb springs to life, the stand turning out to be a small body with arms and legs, the bulb acting as a head. “Keen gear! A robot?!”

“That’s Li’l Bulb,” Fenton explains. “Dr. Gearloose’s first experiment that hasn’t turned, you know, totally evil. Now that we’ve sorted out most of the bugs. Maybe don’t insult Dr. Gearloose around him, though,” he adds quickly. “Just to be safe.”

She hops up on one of the tables, careful to not disturb the papers or Li’l Bulb on it. Drake’s at work—his “day job”, he calls it, where he’s still a stuntman—and LP’s flying Mr. McDuck and the triplets—Dewey, Louie, and…the one with the hat—over the Atlantic to some remote location, so she’s hanging out with Fenton in Dr. Gearloose’s lab under the Money Bin.

They're supposed to be working on updates for her crossbow, but she's been too busy wandering around, taking everything in.

Gosalyn’s glad Drake and Fenton—mostly Drake—worked out whatever hang-ups they had about being rival superheroes. She’s missed being in a lab, and Fenton shows her everything he’s working on and sometimes talks to her in Spanish, which is nice. Grandpa was the last person to really speak Spanish with her, and she misses it. 

“This place reminds me of Grandpa’s lab,” she says, swinging her legs and allowing Li’l Bulb to climb onto her hand. “Except it wasn’t, you know, underwater. The St. Canard lab was _boring._ ”

“I met Professor Waddlemeyer once, you know,” Fenton says. “He’s a brilliant scientist.”

It warms something in her to hear a fellow scientist talk about Grandpa, especially one who thought—correctly—that he was brilliant. The only other colleague of his she’d really known was Bulba, and she stopped listening to him when she realized Grandpa did all the work and Bulba just sold the ideas to investors.

It also helps that Fenton, like Drake and Launchpad, doesn’t talk about Grandpa in the past tense, like all the parents in the foster homes and her social worker did.

Still, because it’s so easy, she teases him. “You weren’t the fanboy he had to get a restraining order against, were you?”

Fenton’s eyes widen, and he sputters, “No, no! I don’t think so, anyways, I just saw him the one time, and I might’ve talked…a bit, asked for his advice, but I don’t think—”

He’s cut off by one of his own flailing elbows catching a small television next to his workspace. It clicks on, and dramatic guitar music fills the lab, and a sunset-filled title card reads _Patos de la Pasión_.

“ _But—Diego! I thought you were dead!_ ”

“ _Oh, Mariana, I’m not Diego. I’m your third brother—Alejandro!_ ”

“You _do_ watch soap operas!” Gosalyn says, delighted. Oh, this is _so_ going in the group chat.

“No, I watch _telenovelas_ ,” Fenton says. “Very different.”

“How?”

“ _Telenovelas_ usually only go about a year and have one self-contained story, while soap operas span several years and complicated convoluted storylines. That, and _telenovelas_ are in Spanish and usually much more dramatic.”

Her eyebrows jump to her hairline. “Wow, you know _a lot_ about _telenovelas_.”

“M’ma watches a lot of them. This one’s her favorite.”

“What’s it about?” she asks, twisting to look at the screen.

He shrugs. “I’ve watched it three times and I really don’t know.”

“ _Three_ times—?”

“Intern, where are the blueprints for…” Dr. Gearloose trails off at the sight of Fenton, Gosalyn, and Li’l Bulb huddled around the little T.V. “Are you watching soap operas at your workstation again?”

“They’re called _telenovelas._ Very different from soap operas,” Gosalyn says authoritatively. “Now, shh, Alejandro came back from the dead. Or something. I don’t know, but I need to know.”

“What blueprints did you need, Dr. Gearloose?” Fenton asks.

“I’m just…Looking for…Just the…” Dr. Gearloose pauses, narrowing his eyes at the screen. “They were just trapped in that cave filling with water and escaped with no tools or resources. That’s impossible.”

Gosalyn waves her hand in a mysterious way. “ _Telenovelas_ ,” she says in a sing-song voice.

He tilts his head, folding his arms across his chest. "Huh."

“Why can’t I look away?” she asks, twenty minutes later, leaning her elbows on her knees, cradling her head in her hands. “Like, I want to, but I can’t.”

“I’ve been watching _telenovelas_ with M’ma for years, and I still haven’t figured it out,” Fenton says seriously.

There’s a loud sniff over her shoulder and she turns her head to see Gyro dabbing at his eyes under his glasses.

Turning back to Fenton, she whispers loudly, “Dr. Gearloose is crying.”

“No I’m not! I have…allergies.”

The door slams open behind them, and Fenton and Gosalyn jump to their feet, startled, while Gyro dives under the table, fake allergies clearly forgotten.

“Eat arrow, fiend!” she shouts, firing her crossbow at the door.

Drake catches the arrow before it hits his shoulder, looking really cool for half a second before he drops it. “Ow! _Why_ did I think that was a good idea? It always looks so cool in the movies!”

She can’t decide between awe and laughter, because _of course_ only Drake could make catching an arrow out of thin air as dorky as possible. “Sorry, Drake. We thought you might be an evil scientist, and you were gonna, like, swap our brains, or something.”

Raising an eyebrow, Drake turns to Fenton. “Don’t you work for Gyro Gearloose?”

“Yes?” Fenton says uncertainly, eyes darting to the table Dr. Gearloose had dove under.

“Sure, and _I’m_ the mad scientist.”

“Hey!” Gyro’s head pokes out from under the table.

“Oh, hey, Gyro.” Drake doesn’t seem surprised to see the scientist hiding under the table, merely stepping aside as he unceremoniously crawls out from underneath it.

“Gosalyn, you can’t believe everything you watch on T.V. Trust me, as someone who spent a decade as an actor, it’s almost all fake.”

Pursing her beak together a moment, Gosalyn thinks very carefully about her next words before asking, “Aren’t you the one who modeled his entire life after Darkwing Duck?”

“And?” Drake looks confused as she burst into giggles.

~*~

Drake stands in front of her, arms folded over his chest. “A pig in the boy’s bathroom?” he asks.

Gosalyn hunches her shoulders, clenching her intertwined fingers in her lap. “There’s no chance you’d believe I know nothing about that?”

“Not even,” he says drily.

Miss McCaw, the principal, opens the door to her office, and steps out. “Mr. Mallard?” she says in that clipped voice Gosalyn hates.

Smoothing down his wrinkled shirt, Drake holds out his hand for her to shake. “Hi. Miss McCaw, right? We met when I enrolled Gos in school.”

“Yes, along with your…partner.” She says the word like she didn’t know exactly what it entirely meant. “Why don’t we step into my office, and we’ll discuss your daughter’s antics?”

“I’m not his daughter,” Gosalyn says automatically, scuffing her shoe against the floor.

Miss McCaw shoots Drake a look, who shrugs. “I’m just…looking after her, while her grandfather’s out of town,” he explains, the cover story for anyone who didn’t know about the Ramrod coming easily.

She nods, looking confused, but—wisely—choosing not to ask anything further. “I see. Shall we, then?” she says, holding the door open.

Squeezing her shoulder, Drake passes Gosalyn, leaving her in the receptionist area with Mrs. Moonroe, the school secretary, who’s squinting through thick glasses at an ancient computer screen.

The door clicks shut, and she waits about two seconds before she jumps up from her chair and crosses the short space to the office to press her ear against the door.

“I really am sorry about the pig,” she hears Drake say. “I have no idea where she even got a pig, let alone brought it to school. Was there a lot of damage?”

“Nothing too bad,” Miss McCaw replies. “Scared some of the boys, more than anything. But I called you here to talk about something more serious.”

Gosalyn frowns. This was, like, the only bad thing she’d done in a whole week. And, like Miss McCaw said, her pig hadn’t even done anything other than scare some sixth graders and minorly flood the bathroom.

“What is it?” Drake asks, sounding concerned.

“Frankly, Mr. Mallard, Gosalyn’s been a bit of a problem since she’s been enrolled. In the last month, she’s been disruptive in class, picking fights with other students, and now she’s bringing wild animals in the school? If this sort of behavior keeps up, I’m afraid we’ll be looking at some serious disciplinary measures.”

She scoffs quietly. Frankenswine isn’t _wild_ , he’s just a pig that got loose from the petting zoo, wound up in the backyard, and she and Honker caught it so they could teach it to do tricks and make millions. (It’d been partially Louie—and Dewey’s—idea. Animals who could do tricks had made some list, apparently. She and Honker were just the grunts.)

They only brought him to school because Drake still didn’t know she’d managed to catch him, and she didn’t want Frankenswine waking him and LP up after patrol.

And she wasn’t _disruptive_ , she just asked a lot of questions, something Grandpa taught her—“A curious mind is a sharp one, _mijita_ ,” he’d said—and, honestly she wouldn’t get into so many fights if the other kids stopped picking on Honker, or giving her and the other girls on the co-ed hockey team so much grief.

“What?” Drake sounds…mad, almost, and it’s an unfamiliar sound. She’s never heard him sound mad, not even that time she tried to run away or when she accidentally broke the display case with his _Darkwing Duck_ lunchbox in it.

“No, she’s not a _problem_ ,” he continues. “Gosalyn is a good kid, she’s just had a rough go at it lately, things you couldn’t possibly understand. _Frankly,_ she is full of spirit, and when you’re full of spirit, everyone else looks empty. It’s _your_ problem if you can’t understand that.”

Gosalyn takes a step back, a kind of fizzy, warm feeling in her stomach. No one since Grandpa had ever been in her corner or defended her so fiercely. It makes her feel…safe. Protected, like when Darkwing gets between her and a bad guy.

The door opens, suddenly, their meeting clearly over, and Gosalyn has just enough time to scramble away from it before Drake marches out ahead of Miss McCaw, practically diving into the chair she was supposed to be sitting in the whole time.

The look Drake gives her tells her he’s not fooled, but says nothing other than, “C’mon, kiddo,” holding out a hand for her.

She hops out of the chair, shouldering her backpack, and takes his hand, following him as he leads her to the front desk to sign her out.

When they step out of the office, classes are dismissing for lunch. Gosalyn sees Honker across the hallway, carrying a stack of books taller than him. He cranes his head around them to peer at her with pitying eyes.

She shrugs a shoulder, and waves at him with the hand not holding Drake’s.

Dragging her feet to the car, Gosalyn waits until they’re pulling away from the school before she finally asks, “So, am I in, like, really big trouble?”

Drake glances at her in the rearview mirror, smiling tiredly, and her stomach twists, remembering that morning he and Launchpad had made it back from patrol just as she was getting up for school. He’d probably only gotten a couple hours of sleep before the school called him.

“You’re suspended until the end of the week,” he explains. “And I definitely have questions about how you got your hands on a pig, but no. Not big trouble.”

“Some trouble, though?”

He raises a hand with two fingers pinched an inch apart. “Little trouble. No Gamebird, no Waddlepad, no training with Webby and Mrs. Beakley for a week, okay?”

There’d been a time where she would’ve argued how he couldn’t ground her, he wasn’t her _dad_ or anything, and it wasn’t fair, but now…

Maybe it’s just because she heard all the nice things he said in the principal’s office, that she chooses not to argue. She _did_ bring a pig into school, and she _did_ get caught with him. She probably deserves a worse grounding than what she’s getting.

“Okay,” she says in the meekest voice she can muster. Then, because she has to try her luck, at least, she adds, “Hey, since I don’t have school this week, does that mean I can go on patrol?”

Drake snorts. “Yeah, right.”

~*~

“ _Be advised, suspects are armed, proceed with cau…Captain, I’ve lost visual. The store seems to be filling with…smoke_?”

Gosalyn looks down from brushing her teeth to the time on her phone, where she has the police scanner app open. “Right on time, Darkwing.”

“ _Sergeant_? _Any update on the smoke_?”

“ _Yeah, looks like the purple weirdo’s back, Captain."_

She snorts a laugh as the Captain sighs heavily. The SCPD didn't love that Darkwing usually beat them to the bad guys, it made them look bad, but they also couldn't deny that he was a big help in keeping the criminals at bay.

At least that's what Drake says.

" _Any way we can patch in to the store, hear what's going on, Sergeant_?"

There's static, followed by a few loud clicks on the scanner before Gosalyn hears Darkwing's voice. 

" _—terror that flaps in the night! I am the diamond that's not your best friend..."  
_

"Mm. Don't love that one," she mumbles around her toothbrush.

_"I...am Darkwing Duck!"_

The sound suddenly cuts out and she lowers her toothbrush slowly. There’s only quiet static on the scanner for a long while.

“ _Sergeant_?”

There’s another long pause. Then: “ _We have shots fired. Repeat, shots fired. We have visual on the perps once again, looks like one of them is down. We need an EMT back-up to our location immediately._ ”

Gosalyn waits, but they’re no longer talking about the jewelry store. All the worst-case scenarios run through her head as she flips off the light to the bathroom and goes back to her room. Who was hit? Was it one of the bad guys? Or Drake, or LP?

Scooping up her crossbow, she grabs her Crimson Quackette costume from the closet. She’ll just...wait on the couch, with her gear, and make sure they stay alright. And if nothing else, she’d be ready to go help if they needed it. She remembers the bus schedule and knows which stop gets her closest to the tower.

Padding down the stairs, Gosalyn hopes the scanner will come to life once more. If Darkwing went down, surely someone would report it, right? At the very least, she’d hear from Drake or LP herself.

She settles in on the couch, laying her crossbow and phone on the coffee table. For a half a moment, she debates turning on _Darkwing Duck_ , just so the house doesn’t feel so empty, but she doesn’t want to miss anything.

Pulling the blanket off the back of the couch, the purple DW one Drake told her he’d knitted after some surgery, she wraps it around her shoulders, fiddling with the fringe.

“Hey, W.A.N.D.A.?” she says hesitantly. “Can—will you let me know if you hear anything about Darkwing on the news?”

“ _Certainly_.” The computer’s voice is as clipped and polished as always, but there’s a slightly softer edge to it.

Nodding, Gosalyn pulls the blanket—he designed the pattern himself, he showed it to her once, what kind of dork does that?—tighter around her, settling further into the couch with her phone. “Thanks.”

~*~

“Okay, so that’s the hockey rink, gift bags, cupcakes…what else?” Launchpad asks, brow furrowed, tapping the pen against his chin.

“Uh, paper, so you stop writing on your hands?” Gosalyn suggests, laughing when LP cocks his head in confusion, like he hadn’t considered that.

“Huh…”

Drake opens the door, balancing a bakery box in one hand and holding his phone with the other. “Really? Are you sure?” he says into the phone, lifting his chin in a hello.

Gosalyn taps Launchpad’s hand. “Cupcakes. Cross it off.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her. Thanks, Fenton.” Drake hangs up his phone and sets the box down on the table, before leaning down and planting a kiss on the side of LP’s beak.

“Tell me what?” she asks, sliding the box closer to her and peeking under the top, checking out the red velvet cupcakes she’d requested, piled high with cream cheese frosting.

“Hey, hey, save that for the party,” Drake says, pulling the box away. “And who says I have something to tell you?”

“Do you have any other hers in your life?”

“Touché.” Drake unhooks his sunglasses from his shirt collar and fiddles with them for a moment. “You know Fenton and Dr. Gearloose have been working on the Solego plans, right?” She nods absently, still looking longingly at the bakery box. “Well, I didn’t tell you they managed to crack it about a month ago, and they have a working model of the Ramrod.”

Her stomach bottoms out and she sits up in her chair, cupcakes forgotten. “What—what does that mean?” She knew the Solego plans had been stolen by F.O.W.L. and it’d taken them months to get them back, but she didn’t know Fenton and Dr. Gearloose had gotten so close to recreating Grandpa’s last invention.

“It means that he thinks they’ve got it working and there’s a good chance we can try to use it. He said they’ve had some good tests, but they can’t totally predict what’ll happen without an actual run—”

“Can we go tomorrow morning? Before my party?” she asks, clasping her hands under her chin.

Drake and Launchpad exchange a look she doesn’t understand, but she can’t care, because there’s a chance Grandpa could be back in time for her birthday. Huey would like his science puns, she thinks, and Uncle Scrooge would give Grandpa his old job back, or maybe he’d work with Fenton and Dr. Gearloose in Duckberg; he’d flip over the actual Gizmoduck and the inventor of the Gizmoduck suit—and Li’l Bulb? Forget it, he’d love the little guys.

After a moment, Drake sighs and says, “We’ll try, Gos, definitely.”

She grins. “Keen gear! This is gonna be the best birthday ever!”

They don’t find Grandpa.

Deep down, she knew it’d be a long shot, but Gosalyn had hoped against hope that they would. Then the reimagined Ramrod sparks out and doesn’t work and they don’t find Grandpa and she's running out of the lab and to the car before Drake can stop her.

The ride to the home is quiet, none of them saying anything. Gosalyn feels like she should be crying, or screaming, or both, maybe, but she just feels numb.

Drake pulls the car into the driveway of their townhouse and she doesn’t wait for the engine to turn off before pushing open the door to the car and making her way into the house.

She climbs the stairs to her room, not bothering to turn on the light, and throws herself on the bed, wrapping her arms around the plush Darkwing Duck that’s as big as she is, and presses her face in its stomach.

Idly, she tries to remember how she ended up with DW in her room—it must’ve happened after the move, maybe she snuck it in from the tower, though she can’t imagine why; she’d never been one to have stuffed animals or anything in her room.

And it makes no sense why she’s thinking about _this_ of all things _now,_ when it feels like she’s lost Grandpa all over again and her heart’s splitting open and it feels like she’s breaking apart with it and…

“Gosalyn?” Drake’s voice is soft by the door.

“I don’t feel good, Drake,” she says automatically, not bothering to look at him. She hates how her voice wobbles a little bit, and that steels her resolve to not look at him.

He’s quiet for a moment, then he says, “Okay, honey. Me and LP’ll be downstairs if you need us, okay?”

Gosalyn doesn’t answer, and she hears the door pull shut quietly.

That’s when the tears come.

She hasn’t cried this long or hard since the night Grandpa disappeared. The sobs tear from her throat, choking her, and her tears soak DW and her pillow. She cries until she can’t cry anymore, until her stomach hurts with it, until her sobs quiet into hiccups.

Sniffling, she hears Drake downstairs on the phone, calling Donald and Mrs. Muddlefoot and the parents of the kids from her team, getting the word around to everyone that the party’s cancelled. And that really makes her stomach turn over. Drake and Launchpad had been so excited to throw her a party, and it’s been so long since anyone’s been excited to do anything for her.

Gosalyn wraps herself in the _Darkwing Duck_ blanket she’d stolen from the living room, laying on her back, staring at the ceiling. She misses living in the tower some days, but having a real, actual room all to herself is nice. It’s something she hasn’t had since Grandpa…

She rolls over, burying her face in her pillow as though she can drive those thoughts from her head.

Her phone buzzes in rapid succession, and she lifts her head enough to see the screen light up with texts. Webby and Huey and Dewey and Louie and Honker, all texting her some variation of happy birthday and cheery wishes and promises of adventures next time she came to the mansion.

Even her friends’ best intentions leaves a bitter taste in her mouth and Gosalyn turns her phone off, because one more emoji chain from Webby or video of Dewey—with a keytar?—would just make her feel worse.

It’s getting dark out and she vaguely wonders if Drake and LP are about to go out on patrol. She normally looks forward to patrol all week, but tonight she can’t even think about summoning the energy to want to go tonight.

She turns her head over her shoulder when she hears the faint sound of the _Darkwing Duck_ theme song from the living room.

Slowly sitting up, Gosalyn pulls her knees to her chest. They were probably just watching an episode to psych themselves up before patrol. She’d seen them do it enough times. Drake would be back up in a bit to tell her they were going out, and they’d leave her at home with her heartache and W.A.N.D.A.

The thought makes her stomach turn again, so she picks up a comic, flipping through the pages, not really taking in the story or the pictures, desperately looking for a distraction.

She hears one episode turn into two, then three, and Drake doesn’t return, and the time for going out on patrol came and went.

Closing her comic, Gosalyn pulls the blanket tighter around herself and considers the situation. It’s her birthday, they didn’t find Grandpa, Drake and LP cancelled the party they’d been planning for two weeks, and now they weren’t going on patrol. To stay with her.

Launchpad pauses the show as she pads into the living room, still wrapped in the blanket. It drags behind her, almost like Darkwing’s actual cape.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Drake says, and Gosalyn wraps the fringe around her fingers. He doesn’t use the sappy nicknames for her unless he’s feeling serious. And that’s the second one tonight. “You feeling better?”

He’s giving her a chance to save face, since they all know she isn’t sick.

She shrugs a shoulder. “Aren’t you going on patrol tonight?” she asks instead.

He gives her a shrug back. “Fenton said he would cover for us tonight. He wanted a chance to really see St. Canard in all its glory.”

Nodding, Gosalyn looks between them and the T.V. “So it’s a _Darkwing_ marathon night, huh?”

“Wanna watch with us, Gosaroonie?” Launchpad asks, voice soft, but no less enthusiastic than usual.

There’s part of her, the part that still stubbornly insists that they’re not her family, that wants to retreat to her room once again, hide under the purple blanket until the ache in her chest goes away.

But there’s another part, the little voice that told her to come downstairs when she heard the now-familiar theme song, that tells her maybe she should stay.

She nods and crawls up on the couch in between them, which is something else she doesn’t normally do, preferring to stick to the side, where she can curl up by herself.

But she’s so, so tired of being alone.

“So, who’s the walrus guy?” Gosalyn asks, even though she’s been watching with them long enough—usually under the guise of making fun of the near-ancient show—that she knows who Tuskernini is.

Still, LP launches into a ten-minute explanation of Tuskernini’s backstory and how he and Darkwing Duck came to be enemies, and there’s a ghost of Drake’s hand in her hair, and they watch _Darkwing Duck_ and let her eat one of the red velvet cupcakes, and it doesn’t fix everything, it’s not the birthday she thought she’d have but it fills her with a kind of warmth she can’t deny. So she curls up closer to them and allows herself to be surrounded by it.

~*~

Drake’s asleep, still passed out after the doctor popped his shoulder back in place and whatever painkillers they gave him, and Launchpad’s taking the Thunderquack back to the tower and getting food from Hamburger Hippo before he comes back to pick them up.

Gosalyn’s curled up in the chair next to the bed next to the bed, wishing she could be anywhere but there.

She and hospitals…they didn’t mix, not after both her parents were in and out of them for years, for reasons she can’t even remember now. She just remembers being young and scared and sitting in the waiting room with Grandpa and wanting to go home.

Last time they were in the hospital after patrol, both Drake and LP had been hurt, and it reminded her too much of her parents and she’d locked herself in the Thunderquack until Launchpad had come back and taken her home.

A nurse comes in then, shaking her out of her thoughts. He’s a different one from before, and he gives her a kind smile before he begins checking Drake’s vitals.

“He’s still sleeping, huh?” he asks, writing something on the chart.

Gosalyn nods. “Is…is that bad?” she asks, wrapping her arms around her knees.

“I wouldn’t worry, he should be waking up soon. The doctor didn’t find any signs of concussion, so he’s just sleeping off the meds.” He must see something on her face, though, because he rounds the bed to kneel by her chair. “Hey, I’m Jason, what’s your name?”

“Gosalyn.”

“Gosalyn, I promise your dad’s gonna be fine. He’ll wake up soon, and the two of you can go home, alright?”

She nods, but her throat still feels tight and her stomach flips. She doesn’t bother correcting him about Drake being her dad—most people think it at some point. Webby, who missed all the Ramrod stuff before, Honker when they first moved in, most of the kids and parents on her hockey team.

“Good.” Jason stands and finishes his rounds. He hangs up the chart by the door again, then turns back to Gosalyn. “Do you have someone to take the two of you home when he wakes up?”

“Yeah, his boyfriend will be back soon. The sooner we can go home, the happier he’ll be. We don’t like hospitals,” she explains. “No offense.”

Jason laughs. “None taken. I’ll be back to check on him in about an hour.”

The door clicks shut quietly behind Jason and the heart monitor Drake’s hooked up to seems to echo loudly in the small space. She hates the noise as much as she’s reassured by it.

Gosalyn climbs over the guard, careful not to jostle Drake and lays her head on his hip, pulling out her phone and waits for him to wake up.

~*~

Gosalyn blinks her eyes open, looking up at the stadium lights, trying to remember how she got there. It’s cold at her back, and there’s someone talking above her.

She tears her gaze away from the too-bright lights and turns her head to see Drake kneeling next to her.

“Hey, hey, sweetheart,” he says, squeezing her hand as best he can through her glove. “Are you okay?”

Swallowing thickly, she nods—or thinks she does, at least. “Yeah, yeah, I think so. What’re you doin’ on the ice, Drake?”

His eyes widen momentarily, the way he does when he’s totally panicking but trying to look like he’s not, and helps her sit up carefully. “Do you remember what happened, Gos?”

There’s a faint ringing in her ears she tries to will away so she can focus. A game, she’s in the middle of a game, right? That’s why she’s cold, she’s lying on the ice, because…she’d had her stick raised, just about to pass the puck to Ramona when someone from the other team came slamming into her out of nowhere.

She doesn’t remember hitting the ice.

Gosalyn nods. “Number thirteen better be in the penalty box,” she grumbles, even though she doesn’t really think they meant to do it on purpose, definitely not hit her _that_ hard.

Drake huffs a laugh, squeezing her hand again. “There she is. Do you think you can stand? I need to check you for a concussion.”

Her head feels airy, like it’s packed with cotton, and she’s still having trouble sorting out her individual thoughts and standing feels like an impossible task. “Uhm, maybe?”

He helps her to her feet and Gosalyn just manages to balance on her skates, but she still feels weak in the knees, like they might give out any moment. Drake must see it, because he asks softly, “Do you want me to carry you?”

She hates that idea, even if the concussion theory is starting to sound more and more plausible, because she’s having trouble just staying upright. Looking down, she sees she’s still holding her stick loosely in her hand, which is a miracle in itself, with how she’s feeling. “Can you—?” Gosalyn asks, gesturing a little, hoping he gets the message, because _words_ , words are hard, too, now. 

Thankfully, Drake does, he always does, and he takes her stick in one hand, making sure she’s holding on, and walks backwards, leading her off the ice.

She’s vaguely aware of the fact that the other players are taking a knee on the ice and her teammates on the bench are hitting their sticks against the side boards, the sound echoing in her ears, and oh, that might not be good.

She sits on the bench and Drake helps her take off her helmet, and the lights seem brighter, somehow, and Gosalyn squints a little.

“Is the light bothering you, hon?” he asks, moving a hand to the back of her head, combing gently through her hair, feeling for bumps.

A wave of familiarity washes over her, and not just because she’s been living with a superhero whose catchphrase was “let’s get dangerous” for almost a year and they’ve had their fair share of checking for concussions.

 _“Are you okay,_ mijita _?” Grandpa asks, sitting next to her, reaching for her arm._

_Gosalyn feels her beak wobble, cradling her wrist to her chest. It’s throbbing from the fall she took on the pavement playing street hockey with some of the neighborhood kids. “It hurts,” she whimpers._

_“Aye, come here, let me look at it,” he says._

_She shakes her head, curling in on herself, like if she keeps her wrist close, the hurt will magically go away._

_Instead of asking again, Grandpa sits back and unlaces her roller skates, one at a time, before tugging them off and setting them on the pavement next to him._

_As he does this, Gosalyn feels the threat of tears subside, her grandpa's calm presence soothing her. With a harsh sniff, she holds her arm out for him to look at._

_Grandpa holds her arm gently, squeezing it gently between two of his fingers. "Does that hurt?" he asks._

_She feels her face twist. "A little."_

_"Okay, wiggle your fingers for me,_ mijita _."_ _Gosalyn wiggles her fingers in his hand, and he nods. "Good. There's no swelling, so I think you just need some ice on that wrist and some ice cream in your belly. How does that sound?"_

_Gosalyn nods, and Grandpa picks her up in one hand, and her skates in the other, and carries her back to the house._

All at once, the ringing in her ears stop and her vision comes back into focus.

She wraps her arms around his neck. “I’m good. 'm not dizzy, the light doesn’t hurt, or anything.”

Drake pulls back to look at her seriously. “Are you sure?”

Gosalyn nods. “I’ll just stay on the bench for the rest of the game, yeah? Please? I’m okay, I swear.”

He exchanges a look with her coach, before nodding. “Okay, but if anything changes— _anything_ —let me know, alright?”

“I will.” She hugs him again. “Now go tell Launchpad I’m okay before he falls through the glass.”

They turn together to see LP pressed up against the glass behind their team bench. He gives her a reassuring smile and thumbs up.

"Other team had to knock you out before you whipped them all!" he says, causing Gosalyn to giggle and Drake to shake his head.

~*~

“… _Then the yellow_ …” The brush pulls through her hair, a sensation Gosalyn’s become accustom to and actually _likes_ , sort of, as long as it’s Dad wielding the brush.

(It’d taken months of trial and error since the first time he braided her hair, but he’d finally figured out how to tame her mane of curly hair.)

“ _Rest your head, little girl blue…_ ”

It’s Sunday night, and they’re going through their usual pre-patrol routine. Since she’s not allowed on patrol on school nights, she showers and changes into her pajamas, then her dad braids her hair and sings her her lullaby before he goes. Some nights—more and more often, lately—they’re joined by Launchpad before patrol. Sometimes, he sits with them in her room while Dad sings, or he’ll putter around the house, fixing things they haven’t gotten around to fixing.

Tonight, he’s stretched out on next to her and Dad on her bed, taking up nearly the whole space, locked in an epic battle with her with her Strongbeard and _El Gallo Loco_ figures.

"Give up, you crazy rooster!" Launchpad says in a vaguely Scottish accent. "You're no match for Strongbeard and his, uh...beard!" 

" _Ay-yi-yi-yi_!" Gosalyn trills, lifting _El Gallo Loco_ over her head and crashing him into Strongbeard. "Your beard's nothing against a great _luchador_ like myself! Because a _luchador_ is brave and strong and always eats his vegetables!"

"Maybe you can learn something from your _luchador_ there about eating your vegetables, huh?" Dad jokes, wrapping the end of her braid with a soft scrunchie. 

She groans, dropping her head back so she can look at him. " _Da-ad._ _El Gallo Loco_ was about to win," Gosalyn grouses. "And I'm not a _luchador_ , so I don't have to follow the _luchador_ oath."

"But you do have to eat your vegetables. At least sometimes."

"Ugh, why?" 

"Because I'm your dad and I say so?"

Gosalyn rolls her eyes, fighting a tiny smile that threatens to overtake her face when she sees Launchpad watching them with a soft look. She keeps her voice casual, however, when she asks, "You're gonna be using that one a lot, now, aren't you?"

Dad's arm wraps around her shoulders, pulling her back to his chest, his beak settling on top of her head. He's been extra touchy-feely today, since she called him "Dad" at breakfast, but Gosalyn can't bring herself to even pretend to be annoyed by it. 

"Oh, I'd count on it," he says, squeezing her close once more before letting her go. "Now, go. Get your teeth brushed. We'll be downstairs."

She climbs off her bed, turning to look at Launchpad seriously. "This isn't over, Strongbeard."

"You fought well, _El Gallo Loco,_ " he says sagely. "But no one's ever been able to stop...Launchpad's Surprise Attack!"

Letting out a shrieking laugh, Gosalyn's efforts to run out of the room are thwarted as LP crosses the room in about two steps, scooping her up in one arm and throwing her over his shoulder.

"Nononono!" she laughs, pounding his shoulder with her fists. "No _fair_ , that's cheating, LP! Dad!"

She hears her dad laugh behind them. "Unhand her, fiend!" he says, in full-Darkwing voice. "Or face the wrath of Darkwing Duck!" 

Dad throws a few mock punches that Launchpad deflects, still holding Gosalyn over one shoulder. She kicks her legs futilely, tries going limp, anything she can to get loose, but nothing works.

“Well,” LP drawls. “I guess I don’t want to face the _full_ wrath of Darkwing Duck...”

“Yeah?” Dad says, dropping the voice. “I guess Darkwing’s full wrath should be saved for the bad guys.”

Their fake fight is apparently over, and instead of fake punches, she feels Launchpad lean down and kiss Dad.

“Ugh, this isn’t fun for me anymore,” she groans, wiggling in LP’s arm.

Laughing, he sets her on her feet, and she leaves with an indignant huff, even though she doesn’t mean it. It’s nice, how much they love each other.

Gosalyn brushes her teeth, thinking about the whole "Dad" thing. It'd just...slipped out at breakfast. 

It hadn’t been easy, to wrap her head around the idea of a family that wasn’t her and Grandpa, like it had been for so long. And she wouldn’t stop looking for her grandpa, never, but...it didn't feel so bad to let other people in. 

It's been a year since her dad and Launchpad took her in, a year of nights spent crime-fighting and days in the lab and defying his authority any chance she could and letting her guard down all the while without even realizing it.

She slides down the bannister, hopping off when she meets the first floor, spinning on her heel to find her dad and Launchpad.

Dad’s shrugging on his coat over the Kevlar vest, and he and Launchpad are having what looks like a Very Serious Talk. They’ve been having those a lot, lately, as recently as that morning after she failed to make pancakes and LP came over to save breakfast, but none of the Very Serious Talks have ended with her in a new house, or not going on patrol, so she lets it slide. 

"Alright, I'm ready for bed," she says, hanging off Launchpad's arm. "You gonna kick the bad guys' butts tonight?" 

Dad and Launchpad exchange a look, and she narrows her eyes at them, before Dad says, "I think we can do a better job at it with the Crimson Quackette out with us, what about you?"

Gosalyn drops LP's arm, backing up so she can see them both, tilting her head. "But it's a school night," she says slowly. 

"Yeah, but it's a special occasion!" Launchpad says. 

She looks at Dad, cautiously excited, who shrugs. “It’s been a year, right? Come with us on patrol.”

“Really?”

“You’re back in the tower by midnight, and no getting so hurt we can’t explain to your teachers,” Dad amends quickly. “But yes, really. Suit up, Quackette.”

Pumping her fist, Gosalyn's turning to the stairs before he can finish. "Yes!" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosalyn’s hockey accident is loosely based on true events from my softball days. Can’t remember if I ended up with a concussion or not, which probably....isn’t great.... XD
> 
> This turned out w a y longer than I anticipated, so if you stuck around and read the whole thing, THANK YOU so much for indulging my first Darkwing fanfic!! Hopefully not my last, so keep an eye out!
> 
> I’d love to know what you think!
> 
> xx


End file.
